Mind control or social control

Compassion for those suffering mental health problems is a “great liberal cause” said UK deputy Prime Minister and Liberal Democrat leader, Nick Clegg, earlier this month. Promising to end the stigma around mental distress, Clegg said he wanted Britain “to be a country where a young dad chatting at school gates will feel as comfortable discussing anxiety, stress, depression, as the mum who is explaining she sprained her ankle.”

We have here all the ingredients for the classic British political debate. In one corner the liberals or centre-left want equality and compassion for people with mental health problems (former Labour spin doctor Alistair Campbell advocates parity of understanding and services between physical and mental health) while, in the opposite corner, conservatives favour forced treatment and a more punitive approach. Let battle commence.

It is, of course, a phoney battle. What is conspicuously missing from the debate is a sense of curiosity as to why “anxiety, stress, depression” are so widespread. To do so, would diverge from the neo-liberal obsession with wiping away the consequences, and enter into the no go area of root causes.

But what is most revealing is what kind of treatment the mentally distressed would receive should it actually be there.  According to Clegg three-quarters of patients, those who are anxious or depressed, need access to “talking therapies”. This invariably means some form of ‘cognitive behavioural therapy’ (CBT) which can take place one-to-one or in a room with 300 others. CBT is now the NHS’s mental health treatment of choice (aside that is from prescribing anti-depressants).

Self-administered mind control

CBT tries to get the patient to change their attitude to the world around them, and in the process, come to understand that the complexities and frustrations it generates are, in fact, produced by themselves, not by other people or the world outside. According to the psychologist, Oliver James, CBT makes the assumption that “unpleasant emotions result from inaccurate thinking”. CBT can be beneficial, says James, because having a sympathetic but independent shoulder to cry on, is helpful in itself. But its effects are often ephemeral and, he believes, it “explicitly discourages patients from considering the childhood origins of their problems, and even worse, [it] actively rejects any analysis of how the person’s society could be making them ill.”

CBT, this society’s response to the epidemic of mental distress, is actually a microcosmic version of its belief about how a healthy person should live their life. Happiness, or its lack, is the personal responsibility of the individual, and can be attained with the right attitude. The outside world is taken as an unchangeable given. If the conventional route of career advancement doesn’t work, or doesn’t supply enough meaning, there are legions of self-help or positive thinking regimens to fill the void. If that doesn’t satisfy, versions of Eastern religion and Buddhism are on hand to provide ancient wisdom. But what all these different disciplines have in common is an unshakeable focus on a person’s internal life, not the world ‘out there’. We are, says the writer Dan Hind, offered various regimes of “self-administered mind control”.

And when the world doesn’t respond as it should, there is no-one to point the finger at but ourselves. The sociologist Richard Sennett has made the disconcerting discovery that in recent years, people who are made unemployed for structural reasons, nevertheless blame themselves for their joblessness. The UK government seeks to change attitudes among unemployed benefit claimants as if that is all that is holding them back. But a go-getting attitude will not make falling real wages rise, turn last-ditch self-employment into an entrepreneurial road to riches, or transform workers into anything other than “labour costs” for those eager to exploit them. Social problems will not be solved by individual solutions.  Moreover, the incessant focus on ourselves has not reduced depression or anxiety. Rather they seem to become more prevalent with each passing year.

Step outside

Perhaps we need to turn the telescope around.

Admittedly this seems counter-intuitive. “An alternative perspective, one that takes into account the social and institutional circumstances of life and seeks to reform their pernicious effects on the self, seems somehow confused,” says Dan Hind in his book, The Return of the Public. “How can I help myself if I don’t concentrate all my energies on myself?”

But in actual fact, turning away from ourselves and instead concentrating on changing the external world may be the route to better mental health. The Second World War in Britain was a time when the country definitively turned away from private concerns to face an external enemy. Yet, contrary to the predictions of psychiatrists, mental distress declined during the war. Physical health also improved and perhaps even more counter-intuitively, life expectancy in Britain during World War 2, rose.

We know that gross inequality feeds mental distress, and that a consumer society that constantly presents images of others enjoying the blessings of a materially superior life, are lethal to feeling  good about yourself, yet vital to a capitalist economy that lives on the profits of selling more and more products. A serious endeavour to “de-marketise” our society, to provide a basic and secure income for all, to return public services to a concern with the experience of the user, not the profit of the investor, to supply the basic necessity of affordable, decent housing, and above all to reduce the sense of being ripped off and exploited at every turn, would, I am sure, result in a quantifiably mentally healthier society. Certainly, a less anxious one.

One of the blights of our time is loneliness, a state which can easily lead to anxiety or depression. Dan Hind, whose chapter in The Return of the Public, entitled ‘Estranged from Ourselves’ is well worth reading, advocates the formation of assemblies in each Parliamentary constituency to debate issues of public concern. Freedom, he says, “requires the opposite of solitude”, and a place to meet other people in conditions of equality, not seeing them as economic rivals or clients, may be the opportunity to turn away from ourselves that we most need. “There are few of us who wouldn’t benefit from some time spent talking in confidence with a qualified professional,” he says. “But all of us would benefit from talking with one another about matters of common concern.”

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