Expert Fascists: The Untold Story of the Spirit of Our Age

“History is a nightmare from which I am trying to escape,” someone said once. In the case of austerity, the nightmare has lasted for more than a century and the alarm isn’t about to jolt us into reality. “Outside, perhaps, of the less than three booming decades that followed World War II," Clara E Mattei notes soberingly in the introduction of her fine book The Capital Order, “austerity has been a mainstay of modern capitalism”.

Even the words are the same. In 1920, upholding the urgent need for countries to “pay their way” through spending cuts and individual abstinence, Lord Robert Chalmers, former permanent secretary at the Treasury, warned of the necessity of “painful” choices. In 2024, as an autumn budget featuring spending cuts of £1bn per department and tax rises looms, Sir Kier Starmer, PM of something called the ‘Labour’ party, has told us to steel ourselves for the “painful” decisions that must be made.

And just as in the 1920s, the promised sunlit uplands – the better times which this perpetual medicine is supposed to give way to – never appear. We must, says Starmer, “accept short-term pain for long-term good”. But we have been hearing that message for 14 years. Britain has been subject to austerity – of the fiscal kind – since 2010. And we (or the governing classes) are still making the same mistake. Maybe, as Mattei suggests, it’s not a mistake.

The Capital Order is about the origins of the creed of austerity. In the aftermath of the First World War, when the public wanted a “land fit for heroes” and the workers’ movement was on the march after decades of subservience, the wise, grey men in the shadows of power realised that something had to be done. The pressure of “excessive” demands on government had to be eased and workers, who were not only pressing for wage rises but questioning the immutability of the rule of capitalists over industry (‘the capital order’ of the book’s title), needed to know their place again.

Without drastic change and a remoulding of public opinion, the result would be ‘socialism’ or, in the worst nightmare of all, workers’ control and Bolshevism.

In Britain, the spirit of the age was trending in this catastrophic direction. Strikes were rampant and ‘reconstructionists’ from the elite, inspired by what had been possible during the war after laissez-faire had been discarded, were hatching plans for a free national health service and huge house-building programme (financed in part by local councils through non-profit making building guilds). It is fascinating to discover that the bulk of the reforming programme of the Attlee government after the Second World War was actually drafted in 1918-20 before being brutally scotched.

In Italy, as Mattei elucidates, things were even more serious. The workers’ movement was reaching the peak of its power – factories were seized and occupied during the long hot summer of 1920. The government stood by, helpless, and revolution seemed just a matter of time.

But at this point in both countries economists and bankers decisively entered the stage of history. On their advice, politicians implemented ruthless austerity. In Britain, savage spending cuts (the ‘Geddes Axe’) were forced through, and a policy of high interest rates, which caused a recession and mass unemployment, imposed in the face of protests. By 1922, wage levels were a third of what they had been in 1920, and 20% cuts in government spending were forced through. Confronted with the situation, workers went into survival mode and the strike wave evaporated.

The Italian ‘solution’ was even more extreme – Fascism. Mussolini marched on Rome and the supine Parliament granted full powers to his minister of finance, the liberal economist Alberto de Stefani, and his team of mainly non-Fascist advisors.  Free to follow their hearts’ desires, they implemented drastic reductions in welfare spending, abolished short-lived experiments in progressive taxation on the rich and corporations, and privatised state-run enterprises such as telecommunications. Coupled with Mussolini’s brutal physical destruction of the Left and workers’ organizations, the economy was pacified and profit-making made a safe endeavour again – though at the cost of wage levels, which sank like a stone, and political and economic freedom.

I must quibble here with the subtitle of the book – How Economists Invented Austerity and Paved the Way to Fascism. In Italy, they didn’t pave the way to Fascism; they were Fascism.

But regardless, what Mattei has done here is a wonderful example of historical revisionism (which is usually tainted by being associated with holocaust denial). It tells you things you very likely did not know and corrects the oversights of the historical ‘canon’ – a narrative which views the 1920s as a well-meaning period blind to the pain to come as a result of the Great Depression and the “low, dishonest decade” to follow. This book changes the way you view the past and thus the present.

Based on the experience of the last decade or so in Britain and Europe, most people tend to view austerity in terms of budget cuts and (regressive) tax rises. But, as Mattei points out, this is just one prong of the “austerity trinity”.

Fiscal austerity (1) is often accompanied by (2) monetary austerity which entails large rises in interest rates – the cost of holding debt – ostensibly to combat inflation but at the cost of driving the economy into recession. In the 1920s, this was known as the “dear money” policy – “the queen of all austerity policies in Britain” according to Mattei.  Dear Money was inaugurated in 1921 (when interest rates were raised to 7%) and lasted for more than a decade. It was still the official response to the Wall Street Crash of 1929 and predictably only made things worse. But the most brutal example of monetary austerity in the West took place at the beginning of the 1980s on both sides of the Atlantic, when interest rates were hiked to above 17%. The result was recession, mass unemployment (reaching 4 million for a decade in Britain), and the taming of organized labour. Again these results were not an unfortunate mistake. And the lady wasn’t for turning.

The last leg of austerity is (3) industrial austerity, which involves privatisation and crushing organized labour and the right to strike. Both, as Mattei details, were an integral part of Fascist austerity in 1920s’ Italy which literally destroyed (physically) the workers’ movement, enshrining a period of ‘industrial peace’. Industrial austerity was zealously resuscitated by Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s leading to a world-wide revolution in economic ‘common sense’, shaping the economic landscape we now take for granted. Nowadays in Europe, if you displease the economic overlords of the European Central Bank, you will be compelled to swallow the medicine of both fiscal and industrial austerity – budget cuts, privatisation, and laws against striking.

But if the economic history of the 20^th and 21^st century has, in the main, been one of austerity, the three horsemen of the austerity trinity have not always been paraded at the same time. Depending on the circumstances, different aspects have been stressed while others have been ignored – or in fact seriously transgressed.  This discordant record, dependent on the needs of the time as defined by technocrats shielded from democratic accountability, reveals – as we will see in part two – a lot about our current economic predicament.

What about the workers? Jeremy Corbyn and the private sector

Here's a disturbing fact. In May’s UK General Election, if only workers in the private sector had been allowed to vote, the Conservatives wouldn’t have just scraped a majority, they would have absolutely romped home. Labour got a paltry 26% of the vote (and the Tories 43%). How is this possible for a party that was created, at the start of the last century, as a party of private sector workers? And will the Blairite nemesis, Jeremy Corbyn, be able do anything about it?

To understand Labour’s steady diminution on this issue and the fact people manage to maintain a straight face when the Conservatives now present themselves as a ‘workers’ party’, you have to look at history and the Labour party’s gradual surrender to the forces of corporate Britain and the inexorable decline of organised labour.

A brief of history of Labour and work

When Labour was formed in 1900 it was as a political party representing the interests of trade unions - with a socialist wing attached. Given that Britain at the time was a resolutely industrial society, trade unions could justifiably claim to represent something approaching a majority of society. The socialist wing of the Labour Party became dominant with the adoption of the party’s Clause 4 constitution committing it to ‘common ownership’ in 1918. The fact that the Labour party was officially socialist did not mean that it was about to institute socialism. In the late 1920s and early ‘30s when it finally got it hands on power of some sort, Labour was spectacularly conservative, supporting austerity and welfare cuts. But there was nevertheless an assumption that the current autocratic organisation of private sector work (there wasn’t a public sector to speak of at the time) was living on borrowed time.

It was only after the Second World War, when Labour was elected with a massive majority, its so-called ‘High Noon’, that the party could make the kind of society it desired a reality and change the character of work in the private sector. Writing in 1947 the American political scientist, Robert Dahl, said there were two contradictory schools of economic thought about which way Labour should go: “one advocating central control of the economy in the hands of the state, and the other advocating workers’ control, where “workers will no longer be merely passive victims of the productive process, but direct participants in the control of productive enterprises”. The Labour government decisively choose the first option: industry was controlled by civil servants and appointed managers. Ownership may have changed but the new organisation merely mimicked the old, autocratic form of private sector organisation. In archive footage from the film, The Spirit of ’45, one miner laments that the ‘same tyrants’ remained in charge after nationalisation.

Though few realised it at the time, the roots of the Labour party’s alienation from private sector workers were laid here. But for a long time Labour’s model of nationalisation held sway. For 30 years the economy was resolutely mixed; even the travel agent Thomas Cook was in state hands. The interests of workers were thought to be sufficiently represented by strong trade unions, either in the now much larger public sector or the private sector.

This changed utterly with the arrival of Margaret Thatcher. The power of trade unions was destroyed and state industries privatised. In retrospect, talk of a property-owning democracy now feels like a transparent fraud, but Thatcher drove a tank through the mixed economy, post-war consensus - helped enormously by fact that the City of London, media magnates and other owners of private sector capital backed her the hilt.

The reaction of Labour was first to resist this new dispensation, then reluctantly accept some of it (Labour under Neil Kinnock was still in favour of some ‘social ownership), then to wholeheartedly embrace it all under Tony Blair. The Labour Left, of which Jeremy Corbyn was a part, merely defended the old approach from these multiple onslaughts.

New Labour and ‘the big end of town’

Tony Blair’s genius in winning elections was entirely the product of convincing the City of London and media moguls like Murdoch and Richard Desmond that New Labour wouldn’t interfere with their power. Originally interested in Will Hutton’s stakeholder democracy idea for the running of companies, Labour backed down the moment they discovered ‘the big end of town’ didn’t like it. The result was that New Labour’s view of the private sector – a part of the economy employing about two-thirds of society – was entirely determined by the desires and interests of those who owned those companies. Yes, the Labour government made it slightly easier to get trade union recognition, but, in a complete reversal of what the Labour party was originally about, the assumption became entrenched that the interests of the owners of companies and those that worked for them were identical. Both wanted ‘success’ and, in practice, what that entailed was left to the owners to define. To even whisper about nationalisation, or, heaven forbid, workers’ control, was to immediately place yourself beyond the pale.

When Ed Miliband lost May’s general election, the idea instantly sprang up amongst the Blairites that a primary reason was that he was anti-business. Yvette ‘Work Capability Assessment’ Cooper recalled going to a CBI conference after the election and being confronted by a businesswoman who told her, ‘You pushed me away. I felt like you did not want my vote. My staff felt the same.’” Note the location and the trademark assumption that that interests of owners of capital and employees were indistinguishable, although only the owner gets to articulate them. Added to this was the specious and, politically dumb, assumption that wealth creation was a gift generously bestowed by the owners of businesses and entrepreneurs.

But though the Labour Left may not have liked these associations or conclusions, it had very little to say about the private sector. This was, now that the trade unions in the private sector had been decimated, decisively ‘enemy territory’. The public sector, however, palpably needed defending, first from the import of private sector techniques under New Labour, and then from austerity. This turn inwards was disastrous. The envy that has underpinned hostility towards benefit claimants stems in part from a perception that private sector workers feel abandoned by an official Left that doesn’t seem remotely interested in them, or their problems. With the desertion of the Left, the private sector is perceived as an homogeneous mass, not the locus of conflicting interests, desires and outright coercion that it is.

All the new thinking about how private sector businesses should be organised has come from outside the Labour party. American economist, Richard Wolff, is trying to forge a social movement in favour of worker self-directed enterprises. In the UK, the authors of the influential book, The Spirit Level, Kate Pickett and Richard Wilkinson (who have backed Corbyn), advocate the development of workplace democracy, along the lines of the famous Mondragon group of cooperatives, throughout the economy.

The major stumbling block, sturdily erected by New Labour, is that it would be suicidal to focus on anything but the success of private sector companies, for the sake of workers as much as anybody. But the obsession with conflating success with the interests of owners, though deregulation and tax cuts, has led to its complete opposite – an endless financial crisis and insipid economic growth.

Beyond neo-syndicalism

However, before advocating that a Corbyn-led Labour party embraces a neo-syndicalism, it is necessary to remind ourselves that the nature of work has dramatically changed in the last 40 years. In the 1970s, it could be said that workers were still essential to the way production was carried out, and to ignore them was to invite disaster. Workers’ control was possible and, in some places, implicitly happened. Forty years later, the UK is largely a de-industrialised country and workers live with the ever-present threat of abandonment. If they are not necessary to produce profit, they won’t be used. Around 15% of UK workers are now self-employed anyway. Moreover, whereas manual labour was a source of pride and identity, today work is often characterised by just going through the motions to get a wage. According to a 2013 US Gallop survey, seven out of ten workers are ‘actively disengaged’ from their jobs. In Britain, 37 per cent of employees think their jobs are meaningless. Democracy at work won’t alter the fact that many people want to get away from their jobs, to many they are a necessary evil.

This is where an unconditional basic income could come in. A basic income could enable activities unrelated to work but vital for a flourishing society – such child-rearing, caring or artistic pursuits, but also facilitate small-scale economic activity that could breathe life into areas that the conventional corporate economy has left behind. The formation of thousands of cooperatives, social enterprises and other small businesses would become possible if they did not have to maximise profit. Both as an economic strategy and a way for the Labour Left to escape from its public sector ghetto, a basic income could be invaluable.

When Marxists disagree

From outside, Marxism can appear an ideological monolith. Workers, so the story traditionally goes, involuntarily supply their employers with surplus value and watch as the capitalists’ wealth exponentially increases, while they themselves get poorer. Through some combination of the working class overcoming their false consciousness and getting wise to the real situation and the unavoidable instability and crisis-prone nature of the capitalist economic system, the crunch will come, revolution will result and everyone will live happily ever after now that class distinctions have been abolished. Amen.

The truth is more complicated. Marxian economics - and it is economics that Marx was fundamentally concerned with - is a much more contested field that you would imagine. Two recent books by American Marxists, The Endless Crisis by John Bellamy Foster and Robert McChesney and Andrew Kliman’s The Failure of Capitalist Production illustrate the dissension.

At stake is what causes economic crisis, more importantly, this economic crisis. Is it a growing gap, as Bellamy Foster and McChesney maintain, between the endless production of goods and services and workers’ finite ability to consume them, leading to stagnation? Or, as Kliman says, the decline in the rate of capitalists’ profit, leading to stagnation (alright, they do agree on some things).

Monopoly capitalism

We live, say The Endless Crisis authors, in a society dominated by very large monopolistic and oligopolistic corporations, a trend which is only exacerbating through constant mergers and acquisitions. The power of these giant corporations means they are able to extract more and more profit (or in Marx-speak, surplus) from their workforce; profit that needs an outlet and can’t all be absorbed by the consumption of wealthy investors. The trouble is demand can’t keep up; the value of real wages in the US is lower than it was in the 1970s. The result is slow growth and unused capacity – one-third of the capacity of the US automobile industry was unused in the run-up to the Great Recession, for example.

In these circumstances, speculative finance becomes irresistibly alluring, as the only way to effectively deploy all the money that is being made. The portion of US national income devoted to finance, real estate and insurance, say Bellamy Foster and McChesney, has risen from 35% in the early 1980s to over 90% now. But the escape promised by financial baubles like mortgage backed securities or credit default swaps is illusory because they make crashes, like the one in 2008, far more likely.

And the promised escape is actually a trap because, once a crash has happened, the political authorities can think of nothing but reinstalling the old casino economy because they regard the ‘real economy’ as irretrievably stagnant. Think of the UK economic recovery, based on near zero interest rates and rising house prices. “Rather than overcoming the stagnation problem,” write The Endless Crisis authors, “this renewed financialization will only serve at best to put off the problem, while piling on further contradictions, setting the stage for even bigger shocks in the future.”

What does stagnation mean? It means lower wages, stalled careers, unemployment and under-employment, lack of social mobility and periodic economic instability. The authors quote older economists Paul Sweezy and Henry Magdoff, who, writing in the late ‘80s, reflected on their formative experiences of fifty years before: “For us economic stagnation in its most agonizing and pervasive form, including its far-reaching ramifications in every aspects of social life, was an overwhelming personal experience” But this is not the same for people who grew up after the Second World War. “Under these circumstances,” they wrote, “they find it hard to relate to what they are likely to regard as our obsession with the problem of stagnation. They are not quite sure what we are talking about or what all the fuss is over. There is a temptation to say: just wait and see, you’ll find out soon enough.” We are now finding out.

Not quite recession

In one way, Andrew Kliman doesn’t disagree with this prognosis. He, too, thinks we live in a “new normal of not quite recession” and the future of the economy is likely to be stagnation, interrupted by crashes. But, in another, he disagrees profoundly. For he traces the problems back to a completely different source, a fall in the rate of profit. To Kliman, problems of “effective demand” (the expression is from Keynes) are a red herring. Demand hasn’t fallen and, even if it had, it wouldn’t matter. This is a complete reversal of standard left-wing economic thinking which says that companies are compelled by competition to introduce new technologies and cut costs, thus precipitating an ever-widening gap between supply and demand.

It’s fair to say Karl Marx’s theory of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall is commonly thought of, if it is thought of at all, as a historical curiosity. Or just plain wrong. Many Marxist and radical economists were convinced that the Japanese economist, Nobuo Okishio, had proved its falsity in 1961. Needless to say, Kliman says he did no such thing.

This is how the theory goes. Marx said that all value is created by labour. But as mechanisation proceeds and edges out work performed by people, value or profit decreases. Eventually this fall in the rate of profit causes a crisis. If – and this is the important part – the destruction of capital value caused by this crisis through bankruptcies, companies going bust and unemployment, is allowed to happen unimpeded, the whole process can begin afresh. It becomes much cheaper to buy companies and rate of return on profit resumes at a new peak. A new boom ensues.

Even if they don’t explicitly reject the theory, many Marxists say profit isn’t falling. The Endless Crisis authors say that the rate of profit fell during the nineteenth century under conditions of competitive capitalism but it has risen since as monopolistic corporations have ruled the roost. Indeed the rising amount of profit or surplus is a prime reason for the crisis because it is diverted into speculation, having nowhere else to go. Probably the most famous contemporary Marxist, Richard Wolff, says profit has gone wild in the US as a result of falling wages.

Capitalism hasn’t changed

Kliman says this is all mistaken. “Capitalism has changed far less than many people – its critics as well as its supporters – want to think,” he writes. The rate of profit has fallen, though this has been masked, initially by inflation and then by the fact that economists used the wrong measure of profit. Kliman says radical economists, for some reason, measure profit by what it costs to replace machinery as opposed to the more common sense method of judging the rate of return on advanced capital.

Not since the Great Depression of the 1930s, says Kliman, has there been a free market response to an economic downturn. Every subsequent downturn has been washed away with government subsidies and debt guarantees. This ensures that the downturns have not been half as severe as they otherwise might have been but also that there could be no resultant boom because capital value was not destroyed. The US economy, he says, has never properly recovered from the recession of 1974. And because of this the rate of profit has continued to fall, and is reflected, in a delayed fashion, in increased debt and financial speculation.

Kliman’s explanation does differ profoundly from what he calls the “conventional Left account” and, rather than rejecting it or accepting it in toto, I think it needs some interrogating. I think the most important questions are:

Firstly, Kliman uses a method of measuring the rate profit – the rate of return on advanced capital – which he says is meaningful to most people and to business itself. Given that, a discernable decline in the rate of the profit should have been a major concern of business over the past thirty years or so and hotly debated in the business press. I’m not aware of this, so why hasn’t it happened?

Secondly, Kliman says that in order for a fall in the rate of profit to be actualised, prices have to fall. But inflation has been the norm at least since the Second World War. The only area of decreasing prices for Western consumers I’m aware of, is in the realm of cheaper clothes and the reason for that is super-exploitation of garment workers in countries like Bangladesh and Vietnam, not mechanisation. And mechanisation, according to the theory, has to occur in order for prices to fall and the rate of profit to drop.

Thirdly, I don’t believe demand is so irrelevant to capitalist economic health as Kliman says. Kliman is a dyed in the wool demand-sceptic. He claims the post-World War Two boom was not due to pent-up consumer demand or government stimulus but to a resumption in a high rate of profit. But why did this reinvigorated rate of profit not kick in in the late ‘30s, when the US slipped back into recession as government stimulus was temporarily withdrawn? The pre-conditions of a new boom were present, as capital value had been destroyed utterly in the downturn of the early ‘30s. So why did it take the Second World War to put the Great Depression out of everyone’s misery?

Kliman maintains that the final consumer is not as important to capitalist economic health as most radical economists think. Businesses can and do sell to other businesses and investment spending has risen much more markedly than consumption spending in the US, over the last 75 years. That is why the economy grows at all. He is also at pains to point out that only with a very selective use of statistics, can you demonstrate that real wages have fallen in the US since the 1970s. Using another method of calculating inflation, Kliman says, wages have risen markedly. And if you measure total compensation, including employer social security and medicare contributions, they show an unmistakable rise.

It is widely accepted, certainly not just by the left-wingers or Keynesians, that consumer spending supplies an integral part of economic growth, nearly two-thirds of economic activity in the UK. And it is indisputable that real wages are falling now - by an eye-watering 8.5% in Britain since 2009, according the state Office for National Statistics. At the same time, consumption is forming a large part of the headline rise in GDP, an increase that, in the absence of wage increases, can only come from savings or borrowing. Thus, I think you can safely conclude that consumer spending is vital for economic health and an important component of the profits of the financial sector. Consumer demand is, at the very least, part of the story.

You can’t buck the market

But, in spite of these reservations, I do think Kliman’s insights are valuable, because he has realised something that many Left Keynesians and Marxists don’t want to face up to. Namely, that capitalism depends for its vitality on periodic destructiveness and, in this sense, you can’t buck the market. Keynesianism was predicated upon ending this instability but failed, as shown by the large-scale recession that occurred in the mid-1970s. There is a fascinating table on page 53 of Kliman’s book that gives GDP statistics for all regions of the world. It shows that economic growth was higher in every single region of the globe between 1950 and 1973 than it was between 1973 and 2008. In many places, after 1973, growth fell like a stone. Post-1973, the growth rate in Japan, Europe, Latin America and Africa plunged by more than half. Yes, you can say post-war reconstruction petered out, but a seismic economic jolt clearly occurred in the 1970s, which no amount of neoliberalism, declaring war on organised labour, exponentially increasing credit or providing government support to failing financial institutions, has been able to correct. As Kliman points out, all of our current economic malaises – slow growth, slowly rising wages, spiralling inequality, financial instability and debt crises – date from the 1970s, not the 1980s. In other words, from before the neoliberal era and the supremacy of Thatcher and Reagan.

In this acceptance that capitalism’s problems stem ultimately from the 1970s and that Keynesianism, despite the hype, could not overcome the internal dynamics of capitalism, Kliman has an equivalent in Britain, the economist Harry Shutt. Shutt isn’t a Marxist and doesn’t believe that falling profit is to blame, rather he traces the malaise to the need to find investment outlets for an ever increasing volume of funds (a ‘wall of money’) and a decline, in the digital age, in the demand for large-scale capital investment. Nevertheless Shutt, too, thinks that governments attempts to evade recurrent system crashes by intervening with subsidies and debt guarantees, have only resulted in insipid growth, more instability, spiralling debt and a “postponing of the evil day”. To him, Keynesianism is the problem, not the solution. As with Kliman, Shutt thinks that the corporate debt overhang is too great to permit sustainable growth. Artificial stimulation, from the outside, can’t work.

The intractable problem is that a fervent desire to avoid a fully-played out crash of capitalism is not limited to ruling elites or policymakers. Ordinary people are now are locked in to the success of the system, not just through their jobs but through pension funds invested on the stock market. Nobody wants a crash and the perception that, in Shutt’s words, “preserving the status quo was an end that could justify almost any means” is not confined to the summit of society. If there is another crash coming – and the feeling of The Endless Crisis authors and Kliman is that it’s inevitable – then it’s a sure-fire bet that governments will attempt to quench it with public money. If it proves too big for that then all bets are off as to what will ensue.

The lesson of his analysis, according to Kliman, is that new regulations or laws cannot break with the laws of capitalist production. A “somewhat comprehensive socialisation of investment” as Keynes called for, won’t change the fact that banks still have to exist in a capitalist economy. “Investment decisions cannot be based on what would enhance workers’ well-being or fulfilment of public policy objectives,” writes Kliman. “… a bank that dared to pursue these goals would soon find that lenders and investors would not supply it with the funds it needed.”

The pessimistic conclusion, although Kliman would describe it as sober and realistic, is that institutional structures don’t matter. Neither enterprises controlled by their workers or state enterprises represent a rupture with the laws of capitalism and will just reproduce its flaws. In order to transcend those flaws, you need a society governed by new methods of production and exchange. Yet, workers’ control, or worker self-directed enterprises, is thought of by growing numbers of people as a cure for capitalism. It is to this debate that I want to turn to, next.

In Praise of Idleness, part two. The vanishing point of work

“Manual work is the ideal which is held before the young and is the basis of all ethical teaching,” so said Bertrand Russell in his essay, In Praise of Idleness.

Russell was writing about Stalin’s Russia of the 1930s but delete ‘manual’ and you have an uncannily accurate description of the mores of contemporary Britain, a country that, in the opinion of the author Mark Fisher, has embraced “market Stalinism.” 20% of young people are unemployed but work, paid or unpaid, is exalted as both an ethical and practical ideal. “Arbeit Macht Frei” in the words of one Daily Mail columnist. Yes really.

“What will happen” Russell went on to ask, “when the point has been reached where everybody could be comfortable without working long hours?” We now know what will happen – an intensification of the idealisation of work, a joyless embrace of the tyranny of immediate self-interest. A kind of tunnel vision that refuses to allow questions about the ultimate purpose of work to intrude.

It is tempting to wonder about the curious capacity of ideology to become more intransigent and boastful at precisely the moment when the objective justification for it dissipates. But there is also a stubborn nugget of truth at work here, albeit one fanned mercilessly by the Right. A human being, says Russell in his essay, inevitably consumes a certain amount of the products of human labour in his or her lifetime. Work is, to a greater or lesser extent, disagreeable. It is, therefore, unjust that a person should consume more than s/he produces.

“To this extent, and to this extent only” says Russell, “there is a ‘duty’ to work”. Or, in the unforgiving words of St Paul, “if any would not work, neither should he eat”.

The latter threat is at the heart of the Conservative assault on social security benefit claimants in Britain; an offensive, emboldened by opinion polls, that has resulted in many people in the seventh richest economy in the world having no food. Not insufficient food. No food. The strivers versus shirkers rhetoric (however divorced from reality) is founded on stoking a resentment that, while you have to go through the disagreeable experience of working every day, others do nothing. That it thrives by inflaming resentment, rather than resting on economic logic, is demonstrated by the fact that the work obligation destroys paid employment.

Heaven knows I’m miserable now

One way to assuage this sense of resentment could be, of course, to make work more agreeable. But that doesn’t chime at all with the priorities of the age of austerity where everything should get worse. It’s ironic that, whereas in the 1980s the Thatcherite Right taunted the Left by saying it wanted to ‘level down’, now the reverse is true. The UK welfare benefit freeze – all benefits will, including tax credits, will rise by an under-inflation 1% -  is justified by the fact that employees are experiencing real term pay cuts. Cuts to public sector pensions are presented as reasonable because these state pensions are more generous than their private sector equivalents, where final salary schemes are becoming extinct. It is proposed to shorten school holidays in order to compete with China. Level down. Make life more miserable.

But there is still a dilemma here for a genuinely radical Left that isn’t in thrall to the work obsession, and is prepared to confront the question, “what is the point of work?” Without many of the basic commodities of modern society, life would be more a slog than it already is. Consumption, in a sense, makes life meaningful. “The problem with full supermarket shelves is that they’re not enough — not that they’re unwelcome or trivial,” writes Seth Ackerman in an illuminating essay, The Red and the Black.

“The citizens of Communist societies,” he goes on, “experienced the paucity, shoddiness and uniformity of their goods not merely as inconveniences; they experienced them as violations of their basic rights.” Many simple conveniences – lights that work, TVs that function, bath plugs that fit – instantly loom very large in importance when they malfunction. The second biggest cause of fires in Moscow in the 1980s, says the economist Ha-Joon Chang, was exploding TV sets. Despite the implications of 3D printing, and the inescapable fact that material production requires fewer and fewer people, useful commodities do not as yet make or repair themselves. Not everything can be performed by robots.

Can I do the mindless, repetitive unpleasant, dirty, smelly jobs please?

It is not mindlessly repeating conservative tautologies to point out that someone has to bake the bread, make the laptops, distribute the food, repair the washing machines, care for the elderly and clean the offices. To do, in other words, the disagreeable activities that few people would freely volunteer to do. At the same time you have to be living in a galaxy far, far away not to appreciate that many contemporary jobs are “socially useless” – hedge fund manager, sales director, lawyer, public relations executive, many types of manager etc etc. These jobs solely exist to further the interests of the organisations that create them. The question for a post-capitalist Left is how do you get useful, necessary and disagreeable activities done, while excluding activities that are either superfluous or harmful?

One answer to the first half of that equation is a market of worker, not capitalist, controlled firms. The ability of firms to freely enter a market is, says Ackerman in the above essay, the way to avoid the scarcity of useful goods that characterised the Soviet bloc. But markets, worker-controlled or otherwise, also have it in their DNA to exploit opportunities to sell, go way beyond actual needs and try to out-muscle the competition. They are socially useless as well as socially useful.

Bertrand Russell’s answer to this dilemma was what he termed a “sensible” organisation of production. “Owing to the absence of any central control (my italics) over production,” he wrote in In Praise of Idleness, “we produce hosts of things that are not wanted.” The presence of “central control”, he implied, would prevent any employee from being compelled to work more than four hours a day. There would be no unemployment and enough for everybody. Russell was more of an anarchist than a Communist but his embrace of “central control” still implies the kind of state central planning, whose pathologies we are far more attuned to now than when Russell was writing in 1932. One post-capitalist writer, David Schweickart, has specifically ruled out any “central authority”. The residual question that Russell’s “sensible organisation” solution doesn’t address is who decides what is and is not wanted and how?

It is possible for the government to legislate that no-one can work more than four hours a day, in much the same way that the French government instituted a 35 hour week in 2000. But over and above the difficulty that the direction of travel is resolutely in the opposite direction (we must all work harder we are told by politicians), the intrinsic problem with this solution is that the government imposes sensible limits on an unreconstructed capitalist productive system that is full to the brim with socially useless activities, and will work tirelessly to nullify the work-limiting legislation. The “workers’ control” solution to overwork would entail the employees of particular firms insisting on a more civilised work-life balance, and/or rotation of work tasks, because they are in charge of the enterprise and they want it that way. But, externally, markets don’t produce “sensible organisation”. The firms within a market have to react to competition and the need to make a profit. A third solution can be seen in the popular assemblies that have sprung up in Europe in response to economic collapse and dysfunctional “democratic” political institutions. They have begun to set up cooperatives to provide for needs that are not satisfied by a failing economic system. A decade or so ago, the assemblies in Argentina in response to an analogous situation, created enterprises such as community bakeries. The relevance to this argument is that the assembly controls the enterprise and can insist upon humane working hours. But the scope of these assembly-controlled enterprises is, as yet, limited and way short of what any meaningful economy would comprise.

I can’t highlight the solution. But the disconnect between, on the one side, the declining demand for paid labour and the vanishing objective need for work, and on the other, the social purpose of production and the desire for a meaningful and spacious life, will bring immense pressure to bear to find a solution.

But to crystallise the case for radically reduced working hours I believe we should concentrate on its opposite. What, in other words, is the point of not working, and that isn’t a non sequitur. It is this question of non-work that I want to examine in the final part of this post.

You can read Part One here by the way

And here is the final part