Despite what Jordan Peterson says, the world is not your lobster*

I’ve been enticed back into reading about Jordan Peterson and his exemplary lobster. For the uninitiated, Peterson – ‘classical liberal’ and self-help guru – believes we should be inspired by the not so humble lobster, willing to fight all-comers (well other lobsters) for the best places to live. The lobster (and also the merciless wren, the chicken, the chimpanzee etc.) is an example of nature’s dominance hierarchy which is a “near-eternal aspect of the environment”. Older than trees in fact.

Humans, according to Peterson, are just as subject to the unforgiving laws of this dominance hierarchy. Despite our cultural pretensions and elaborate societies it still operates under the surface. “It’s inevitable,” avers Peterson, “that there will be continuity in the way animals and human beings organise their structures”. Thus, brutal economic inequality – the fact that 85 ultra-wealthy people at the top of society have as much as three and half billion at the bottom – is given a biological justification.

Read the memo: it’s inevitable, get used to it and don’t – the ultimate Peterson sin – start getting resentful.

The immediate temptation, to which many have succumbed, is to say Peterson’s examination of the natural world is hopelessly partial. Why choose to focus on the lobster or the status-obsessed chimpanzee and pass over the egalitarian, sharing bonobo or the unaggressive, vegetarian gibbon? An argument that can be traced back to Kropotkin’s highlighting of mutual aid among animals, in contrast to the simplification of the survival of the fittest.

Civilised hierarchies

However, this argument rather misses the point, or to be more precise, it concedes too much before it gets to the bone of contention. Because human hierarchies – that is actually existing hierarchies that have dominated the history of human civilisation before reformers, revolutionaries and utopians messed with them – are radically and qualitatively different to animal dominance hierarchies. In fact the latter don’t merit the appellation ‘hierarchy’ at all, the word originally applying to the rule of the high priest in ancient Greece, a uniquely human dispensation.

Only in early hunter-gatherer societies, can human arrangements be said to resemble dominance ‘hierarchies’ among animals in the sense that charismatic and talented individuals might acquire power. And even then, the evidence suggests tribal members were aware of the dangers of power becoming entrenched and embodied in certain individuals and took steps to ensure that, uniquely in the natural world, economic relations, family structure and political life were regularly shuffled.

The history of civilisation in all parts of the world, by contrast, and despite its undoubted benefits, is the history of dynasties, aristocracies, land-owners and empires on the one side and serfs, slaves, indentured labourers, and workers on the other. Slavery was an unmissable feature of ‘civilised’ society for thousands of years. It’s not a Western invention or imposition; it was only abolished in China in 1908.

In such societies, the facts of birth and inheritance were all-important. Intelligence, cunning, physical strength, charisma – or whatever other attributes Peterson thinks differentiates winners from losers – would at best have enabled the lucky incumbent to progress within their caste or class. Only very rarely would they have permitted them to rise within the hierarchy itself. Hannah Arendt’s description of the “caste conceit” of the British aristocracy in the 19^th century – “the pride in privilege without individual effort and merit, simply by virtue of birth” – could be applied to ruling castes and classes throughout history the world over.

‘God hath placed them there’

Such hierarchies were, in Murray Bookchin’s description, were “clothed in ideologies” because they were anything but natural. They were, however, intended to endure and such longevity was not merely secured by immense military power but also because most people, especially those oppressed by such hierarchies, were assiduously convinced of their, often divinely-ordained, legitimacy. Something animals obviously can’t be. Lobsters don’t bequeath their hiding places to their offspring nor insist to other lobsters left with stringy pieces of seaweed as camouflage that it’s blasphemy to object to such inequality because it’s been prescribed by the great lobster god.

Hence belief systems like the medieval ‘Great Chain of Being’ in which everyone – serfs, vagabonds, yeomen, lords etc. – had a recognised position because ‘God hath placed them there’.  In 17^th century England, parish priests issued weekly instructions for servants to obey their masters and behave “lowly and reverently” towards their betters.

In such societies, the personal attributes and characters of rulers might be a source of regret or rejoicing, but they were irrelevant for determining the power they wielded. As Bookchin noted about now infamous European monarchs:

Figures like Louis XVI of France and Nicholas II of Russia, for example did not become autocrats because they had genetically programmed strong personalities and physiques, much less keen minds. They were inept, awkward, psychologically weak, and conspicuously stupid men (even according to royalist accounts of their reigns) who lived in times of revolutionary social upheaval. Yet their power was virtually absolute until it was curtailed by revolution.

But, but ...  I’m guessing Peterson would instantly interject were he to be – unlikely I know – reading this: what you’re saying might be true for human hierarchies deeply ensconced in tradition and time-encrusted practices, but since the advent of liberal-democracy and capitalism and the demise of ancien regimes it has been possible for people born in difficult circumstances to, through their own native ability and self-discipline, rise in society and transform their lives.

“… the most valid personality trait predictors of long-term success in Western countries,” says Peterson “are intelligence … and conscientiousness.”

As a precursor, “success” needs to be defined. Because so much intelligence, conscientiousness and talent that doesn’t fit into money-making purposes and interest those organizations that hire people to do their bidding (and into which democracy is not permitted to intrude) simply withers or is actively suppressed.

Yea, even unto the Middle Ages

However, the other side of the coin is that liberal capitalism’s reputation for social mobility – progressing up the income scale during your lifetime – has been greatly exaggerated even on its own terms. So many of our current political leaders have emerged from privileged backgrounds and wealth amassed before y’know everyone had a crack at it. David Cameron is descended from King William VI and was brought up in a stately home, Boris Johnson’s full name is Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson and Donald Trump inherited his fortune from his property tycoon dad.

Social mobility’s heyday under capitalism was actually in its post-war social-democratic incarnation when the rich were heavily taxed and finance forced into productive investment. Since the 1980s, after capitalism became more purely capitalistic, it’s gone down. A 2017 report found that in the US after the ‘inflection point’ of 1980, inequality skyrocketed and social mobility started “declining sharply”. The British Social Mobility Commission reported last year that inequality is now “entrenched from birth to work” and according to the UN Development Programme a “great new divergence” is taking place around the world, leaving educated young people stuck in low wage, dead-end jobs:

“What people perhaps 30, 40 years ago were led to believe and often saw around them," an UNDP administrator says, “was that if you worked hard, you could escape poverty.” Yet in many countries today, he says, upward social mobility is “simply not occurring” anymore.

This is modern-day capitalism, where intelligence and conscientiousness aren’t, after all, enough to help you lead a better life. And by the way, this conclusion is not impaired by Peterson’s revelation that human and lobsters share “basic neuro-chemistry” so you can administer an anti-depressant to a lobster and it will fight “harder and longer”. Anti-depressants have been administered to millions of human beings since the late 1980s, making evidently no difference to rates of social mobility.

Entrepreneurs and capitalists

Why, you might ask, does it have to be this way? Because capitalism is at heart a system where great wealth is extracted by people who do nothing to earn it. It isn’t, despite the advertising, a justice dispensing machine where, notwithstanding the rough edges, diligent and creative entrepreneurs are rewarded for the improvements they bring to people’s lives.

As author David Schweickart has astutely shown, the entrepreneur is capitalism’s “white knight”, routinely unveiled to justify ‘returns to capital’ that have nothing to do with inventions or improving methods of production. Vast fortunes are made and replenished daily simply by virtue of the ownership of real or financial assets:

In a capitalist society, enormous sums are paid to people who do not engage in any entrepreneurial activity or take on any significant risk with their capital. Trillions flows to shareholders who make an entirely passive contribution to production.

In fact, despite the enormous changes wrought by the economic system known as capitalism, the capitalist bears an uncanny resemblance to the landowners and landlords of past centuries who commandeered immense wealth and power without doing anything to deserve it. Indeed, capitalism has frequently coexisted with small coteries of landowners in most parts of the world. Which is why land reform was such a seminal political issue for numerous countries in the 20^th century – something you might be aware of if you manage to get over a fixation with capitalist white hats and communist black hats.

Don’t complain

The awkward problem is that wanting human society to replicate the daily fights for survival, nourishment and safety evident in the animal world requires not a laissez-faire approach, but massive government intervention in society. It demands severe taxation of the rich and punitive restrictions on inheritance. It compels instituting downwards as well as upwards social mobility, which means abolishing private education that works, in effect, to over-promote a small section of the population and lavish resources on them. And even then, the result would be a pale imitation of animal ‘hierarchies’.

But western societies are intent on the diametrically opposite policy. Every time in recent history – for example the 2008 financial crisis or the current Covid-19 crisis – the wealth of the moneyed and propertied has been threatened, governments stepped in to artificially protect it and institute bogus stock market booms.

Isolated conservatives and ‘classical liberals’ may have objected to this massive transfer of wealth from poor to rich but the vast majority – Peterson included – raised not a whimper of protest.

The grain of truth in Peterson is the emphasis on personal responsibility and the insistence that, whatever your circumstances, no-one, apart from yourself, determines how you react. But others before have expressed this anti-determinism better. “It makes no sense to complain since nothing foreign has decided what we feel, how we live, or what we are,” said Jean-Paul Sartre, trickily also a Marxist, in 1943.

But ignoring the structures of society that are not amenable to individual efforts to change them but can, nonetheless, still be changed collectively, is not only wrong but is liable to lead to depression and resentment, the very things Peterson says he wants to alleviate.

* my son

Our Pikettian Universe

Earlier this month, in announcing plans to replace the David Cameron-created Social Mobility Commission with a new Social Justice Commission, Jeremy Corbyn made a telling, though seemingly unremarkable, observation: “Social mobility has failed, even on its own terms,” he said “… the greater inequality has become, the more entrenched it has become”.

The evidence is all around. According to the aforementioned Social Mobility Commission, social mobility in the UK “has stagnated over the last four years at virtually all life stages”. Last year the OECD reported that, internationally, social mobility was a “reality” for people born before 1975 but has stalled for those reaching adulthood in the 1990s and after. In the UK, according to the OECD, only around a fifth of children of low income families go on to become high earners and only a quarter of children of parents with manual jobs get managerial positions.

These are the results achieved by the unstinting efforts of successive British governments over decades to raise social mobility and achieve a genuine meritocracy. The Conservative-Lib Dem coalition had its ‘social mobility strategy', before then the Blair government vowed to achieve social inclusion, and before then John Major had entered Downing Street promising to create a “classless society”.

Growth and  meritocracy

In Britain, social mobility has all the hallmarks of a secular faith – for people in power at all levels of society a belief in the virtues of social mobility – whatever the evidence – is compulsory, and if it forever seems out of reach, a few policy tweaks, such as adult education or free childcare, will set things on the right course again.

In fact the social mobility faith is remarkably similar to another secular creed – the conviction of the virtues of economic growth. The affinity is most apparent in the fact that belief in them is unshaken by the slight problem that they don’t actually achieve their aims – intergenerational meritocracy in the one case and healthy GDP growth in the other.

LSE anthropologist Jason Hickel, in his book The Divide, correctly observes that “almost the entire economic profession and nearly all politicians” are obsessively focused on raising GDP growth. What he doesn’t go on to note is that this obsession has conspicuously failed to bear fruit. GDP has unquestioningly increased over time, but, as pointed out by the Geopolitical Economy Research Group, the rate of growth, for the world’s industrialised countries, has been trending downwards since at least the mid-1960s.

Since the financial crisis a decade ago, this decline has intensified. For the UK, GDP growth has averaged a mere 1.87% per year since 2010, and for the European Union, the average is even more modest: 1.6%. This is below the 2-3% thought to be essential for profits to be made in the economy and a pale shadow of the 5 or 6% annual growth rates achieved in the 1950s and ‘60s.

Piketty and capitalism

There are several ramifications of low-growth capitalism, one being that debt – corporate, personal and governmental – skyrockets across the board. Another – less noted perhaps – is that low social mobility inevitably follows. In 2014, French economist Thomas Piketty published an almighty tome, Capital in the 21^st Century, to general applause and fanfare. Piketty’s central finding was that when returns to capital are greater than economic growth (when r > g), then inequality is bound to intensify. This is what happened, Piketty asserts, during much of the 19^th century and has occurred over the last 40 years in industrialised countries. It will also be the default state of affairs, he predicts, during the rest of this century.

What are returns to capital? They are income streams that stem from the ownership of assets, such as share dividends, profits, capital gains, rents, royalties and interest. When economic growth is high, Piketty contends, income from labour – which is the only way those without assets can get richer – can outpace these capital returns. When it isn’t, the opposite is the case.

It is fairly apparent, therefore, to see why, in Piketty’s eyes, inequality should increase in an era of low-growth capitalism, such as this one. But it is also the case that returns to capital, should they increase faster than economic growth, also hamstring social mobility. This is because once these assets are amassed, they are almost always passed on to the asset-holder’s children and also because they become concentrated in fewer and fewer hands over time. Essentially they guarantee wealth immobility and ensure that those who are already rich, not only stay rich, but become much richer.

For Piketty, the decades between 1914 and 1973 were unusual because the rate of economic growth was higher than returns to capital.  Coincidentally, this period – certainly the post-WW2 years when economic growth was conspicuously high – was one in which, according to the OECD, social mobility was a ‘reality’.

It is also true that – contra Piketty – in the last decade income from labour in the UK has risen even more slowly than economic growth, reversing the historical norm. In fact wage levels have, in real terms, contracted, while the economy as whole has grown, albeit weakly. Moreover, overall wage levels hide enormous inequality in remuneration. Corporate chief executives have seen vast increases, while earning levels in the lowest income groups have barely moved at all since the 1990s.

But that does not detract from the fact that income from capital has outpaced economic growth, with all the consequences that that entails.

No more Thatcherism

This ‘Pikettian’ problem explains much about the current travails of the Conservative party. The Conservatives simply cannot bring themselves to accept that Thatcherism doesn’t work anymore. The promise of Thatcherism was that assets – such as shares and council houses – would be distributed throughout society, leading to a genuinely popular capitalism. Privatisation, said Thatcher, represented “the greatest shift of ownership and power away from the state to individuals and their families in any country outside the former communist bloc”. The creation of a ‘share-owning democracy’ was the clarion call of the age.

Unfortunately for the Conservatives, the shift was transitory if it occurred at all. Before Thatcher entered Number 10, individuals owned almost 40% of the shares in British companies. When she died in 2013, that figure had shrunk to under 12%. In reality, large companies are now owned by other large companies – frequently banks – in an interlocking system which the small shareholder has no influence over.

Council houses were swiftly transferred from the people who had bought them under the ‘Right to Buy’ scheme to a small coterie of private landlords. Home ownership in general has been in decline since 2003 accompanied by soaring rates of private renting. Governments of all stripes have since the 1980s tried to stoke a perpetual property price boom, mainly by restricting supply and not allowing council or social housing to be built. In these conditions of low-growth capitalism, the main hope of becoming wealthier lay not in a lifetime’s labour but in realising the capital gains (one of Piketty’s returns to capital) from selling your property, possibly numerous times. A route millions took.

The dilemma for the Conservatives (and Blairites) is that high property prices prevent young people from buying homes in the first place, thus ensuring that home ownership becomes more concentrated over time. And because their original promises have proven so hollow, the Conservatives – to save their electoral skin – have resorted to the zero sum game of fuelling a ‘culture war’ and overseeing a no deal Brexit, even at the cost of completely alienating the sector of society – big business – whose interests they exist to protect. ‘Fuck business’ was a retort that came out of Boris Johnson’s mouth, not Jeremy Corbyn’s.

21^st century wage slavery

What our Pikettian universe means is that for many millions of people employment is not – as it was for many decades after the Second World War, even up to the 1990s – an escalator out of their current economic situation and into a better one. As the figures on in-work poverty show, it is merely a means of week to week survival and sometimes, given the fact that many people who show up a food banks also have jobs, not even that.

Naturally, it can be pointed out that most people don’t live in poverty and most people have mortgages rather renting their homes from landlords (and given the fact that interest rates are so low have benefitted from the last decade or so). However, even ignoring the fact that more precarious forms of work are mushrooming, the trend is not in favour of those who clearly gain materially from capitalism. Piketty’s prediction of a low growth future seems quite solid, and in those circumstances, the asset poor will slowly but surely close the gap on the asset rich.

This has ramifications for how work is perceived, although ones that Piketty, who dismisses ‘the lazy rhetoric of anti-capitalism’, does not make. If work no longer comes attached with an ulterior motive – that it represents a way to personally progress – then it will increasingly be seen in terms of its bare essentials: that is, the granting of wages in exchange for obedience. In the 19^th century (the original epoch, Piketty contends, when returns to capital exceeded economic growth and wages were flat), the concept of wage slavery – the idea that the employee is forced by the pressure of need to rent themselves out to employers and endures, in effect, a form of slavery during their time at work – was common on the Left, even the non-socialist Left (see Henry George). If the 21^st century replicates the economic conditions of the 19^th (not literally, mass outbreaks of cholera are unlikely), then the idea of wage slavery will grow in popularity because it will reflect most people’s experience.

This situation also means the traditional ameliorative solution of the social democratic Left – redistribution of income through taxation – will no longer have the effect it once did. If income is primarily secured by the ownership of assets, then redistribution has to focus on ownership. This is why the UK Labour party moves in favour of ‘alternative models of ownership’ – such as cooperatives, municipal ownership and democratic forms of national ownership – are significant. These may be too limited  and too slow  – John McDonnell’s ‘inclusive ownership fund’ would see companies transferring shares to their workforce every year but it would take 50 years for these to constitute a majority – and in essence a policy fix for a systemic problem. But at least they presage a necessary change of thinking.

However, there is a larger problem. Piketty’s central assertion is that low growth capitalism will inevitably lead to inequality intensifying over time. But low growth capitalism is the condition we are told is essential if climate change is to be seriously mitigated. The question is therefore: does averting ecological catastrophe mean entrenching the power of an oligarchy?  I will attempt to provide an answer in a future post.

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.