Consciousness of Sheep
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One of the less obvious aspects of the fall of empires in the early twentieth century was the vacuum left in our collective understanding of “the right to rule.” The empires which collapsed between 1916 and 1918 had been ruled by near absolute monarchies in which landed aristocrats wielded far more influence than the powerless parliaments which had been established more to prevent revolution than to cede power to the people. The sand, however, had been shifting for several centuries in the revolutionary states of Britain, France, and the USA, where the divine right of kings had been replaced with some notion of rule on behalf of the people (or at least that part of “the people” which owned property). Democracy can be overstated though. In the years prior to the war, the leading politicians tended to come from an old, landed aristocracy which had merely adjusted its self-presentation to fit in with the political fashions of the day. Indeed, in the UK political power only passed from the landed House of Lords to the elected House of Commons with the passing of the Parliament Act in 1911.
In Britain, the pre-war liberal governments contained a mix of the old world and the world to come. Within the pro-war faction – Haldane, Churchill, and Grey were each from aristocratic families. Only Asquith came from what was then still considered the bourgeois lower class, as the part-owner of a textile company. Among those less favourable to war, future prime ministers David Lloyd George – a son of the clergy – and Ramsey MacDonald – the illegitimate progeny of highland farmers – were more reflective of an electorate which had been expanded several times during the nineteenth century.
In the aftermath of war, the landed aristocrats tended to fall into the background, while bourgeois stock such as Stanley Baldwin – nicknamed “the ironmonger” because of his ownership of a steel corporation – and a new professional and managerial class, such as barrister Clement Attlee (who had also fought in the doomed campaign at Gallipoli in 1915) would rise to the forefront. And in the aftermath of the Second World War, this mix of bourgeois and managerial classes oversaw the phenomenal period of economic expansion under the so-called “post-war consensus.”
Of interest here – although the British never quite managed to pull it off – was that the post-war consensus revolved around the same tripartite administrative structure that fascists like Mussolini had adapted from the nineteenth century corporatists. A mixed economy of private business within a state framework, in which the state was overseen by representatives of capital, labour, and government. The defeated nations, Japan and (West) Germany managed to prosper under their respective forms of tripartite oversight in the post-war years. But Britain remained too wedded to its imperial past to ever fully reconcile capital and labour under a shared, post-imperial interest.
Perhaps in the immediate aftermath of war, a combination of relief and a desire to rebuild, relegated issues of legitimacy to the dusty inner chambers of the elite universities. Just as during war a form of meritocracy (although often overstated) appeared to work – for example, George Marshall, head of the US army had a reputation for quickly firing failed generals while promoting those who had demonstrated competence… and similar promotions occurred within the British armed forces after the failures early in the war. Meanwhile, behind the scenes, the Second World War had been a triumph for scientists and technicians who, in addition to military feats such as the bouncing bomb, cavity magnetron, mulberry harbours, jet aeroplanes, and the two versions of the atomic bomb, took time out to develop civilian technologies like ATMs, superglue, and penicillin.
And so, in the aftermath of war and with memories of the depression fresh in people’s minds, it seemed that an expansion of meritocracy would deliver economic prosperity… although outside the USA this had to wait until the rebuilding of war-torn countries was complete (rationing in the UK, for example, only ended in 1954). In hindsight, the unprecedented 1953-1973 boom which saw as much production and trade as the previous 150 years, was all about oil and the new, oil-based technologies. Indeed, much of the boom in Europe and Japan involved the switchover from primarily coal-based economies to new oil economies (most visibly, for example, in the big decline in British railways which corresponded to the building of the motorway network). At the time though, the combination of genuine economic growth, full-employment, and a big rise in the prosperity of ordinary working people could be attributed to the new combination of bourgeois astuteness and professional/managerial competence.
Doubts remained though. This was especially true in a British empire which still looked formidable on world maps but was rapidly disintegrating. And while the political left anticipated revolt to arrive from the downtrodden masses, it began as a culture war initiated by the thwarted sons and daughters of the new ruling class itself. It is both hard to measure and easy to underestimate the impact of the new wave of satire which arrived in London in the shape of Cambridge graduates like Johnathan Miller, John Bird, Eleanor Bron, and especially the genial Peter Cook, whose impersonations of prime minister Harold MacMillan caused both shock and diaphragm-seizing laughter among the audiences of the early 1960s:
“When a young British comedian began impersonating the prime minister on the London stage in 1961, hardly anyone in Britain had seen such a thing before. You didn’t mock the British prime minister: why, the man led the world. But Peter Cook played Harold Macmillan as a bumbling old buffer, who was bravely pretending against all evidence that the UK still led the world.
“Cook’s Macmillan would shuffle onstage, and boast that he’d persuaded President Kennedy to give Britain Polaris missiles. ‘We don’t get the missile until around 1970,’ ‘Macmillan’ admitted in his quavering Etonian tones. ‘In the meantime, we shall just have to keep our fingers crossed, sit very quietly, and try not to alienate anyone.’ In any case, ‘Macmillan’ would add, Britain already had its own nukes. ‘We have the Blue Steel, a very effective missile, as it has a range of 150 miles, which means that we can just about get Paris. And by God we will.’
Humour it may have been, but it was also an iteration of the court jester of old… the one person at court who might tell the truth to power without risking decapitation. And the truth the new wave of satirists were telling was of a torpid Britain which was no longer going forward when compared to its European, Asian and North American partners. Again, in hindsight it is easy to see that successive British governments had spent far too much of their economy’s energy and resources trying to hold onto imperial possessions that they would have done well to leave to their own devices even before the Second World War had broken out. The result being that, unlike Britain’s competitors, the British failed to properly invest in the post-war recovery. What the satirists were pointing out was that Britain had thus engineered the worst of both worlds – failing to halt the end of empire and failing to fully capitalise upon the technological and productive advantages of the oil age economy.
The problem went far deeper. If the promise of rule by a bourgeoisie – the owners of the new corporations – supported by a new professional/managerial class had been a period of permanent productivity and prosperity growth, how would their failure to deliver affect their legitimacy? In one form or another, this question has echoed down the years since. In the UK, the governments of Harold Wilson, Edward Heath, and James Callaghan were each, in their way, attempts to steer a path back to the promised eternal prosperity growth. But in the face of energy crises, oil shocks, and increased militancy of both capital and labour, they each failed and were ultimately overtaken by the neoliberalism of Thatcher and Blair. Something similar occurred in the USA, where Lyndon Johnson’s “Great Society” and the attempt to impose democracy at the point of a bayonet in Asia came unstuck, paving the way for the Reagan and Clinton variant of neoliberalism.
Had it not been for the oil deposits off Alaska, the Gulf of Mexico and the North Sea, neoliberalism would likely have been strangled at birth. But the new influx of – relatively – cheap energy, feeding into a new revolution in information and communications technology, gave the western economies one last – and largely debt-based – lease of life which, for a moment at least, took questions of legitimacy off the table. But in their way, the bourgeois heroes of the neoliberal age – godzillionaires like Bezos, Branson, Musk, and Gates – speak volumes about why we are in a far greater mess than we might have been had a different class risen to the apex of power.
Arguably, the one saving grace of the landed aristocracy of the Victorian era was that they were closer to reality. Stewardship of the land had allowed them to rise to their exalted position in the first place. And so, good oversight of the economy was still valued. This included a degree of concern for the livelihoods of the workers whose labour maintained the landed estates – as much a hangover from the feudal period when “ownership” of workers was on a par with ownership of livestock, as any kind of progressive desire to raise living standards. Practically too, the less complex economy of the nineteenth century allowed for owner-management in a way that was impossible in the complex economies of the oil age. Duty also mattered. In the stereotypical aristocratic extended family, the eldest son and heir would assist in the management of the estate, the second son would serve in the government of empire, the third son would join the clergy, the fourth the military. And within this ideal, we also see the structures – civil service, church, and military – which supported the rule of the aristocracy.
Bourgeois rule is different. Entirely untethered from the material world, the ownership class could sit back and accumulate “wealth” in the form of government bonds, share certificates, and numbers in bank accounts. And from such a position came the temptation to hand de facto power to a professional/managerial class all too keen to take over the day-to-day running of the complex corporate structures of the oil age economy… and, of course, to enrich itself in the process. Although mostly remembered for identifying the military-industrial complex, President Eisenhower saw the direction the professional/managerial class were leading us in:
“Akin to, and largely responsible for the sweeping changes in our industrial-military posture, has been the technological revolution during recent decades.
In this revolution, research has become central; it also becomes more formalized, complex, and costly. A steadily increasing share is conducted for, by, or at the direction of, the Federal government.
Today, the solitary inventor, tinkering in his shop, has been over shadowed by task forces of scientists in laboratories and testing fields. In the same fashion, the free university, historically the fountainhead of free ideas and scientific discovery, has experienced a revolution in the conduct of research. Partly because of the huge costs involved, a government contract becomes virtually a substitute for intellectual curiosity. For every old blackboard there are now hundreds of new electronic computers.
The prospect of domination of the nation’s scholars by Federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money is ever present and is gravely to be regarded.
Yet, in holding scientific research and discovery in respect, as we should, we must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite…
“As we peer into society’s future, we – you and I, and our government – must avoid the impulse to live only for today, plundering, for our own ease and convenience, the precious resources of tomorrow. We cannot mortgage the material assets of our grandchildren without risking the loss also of their political and spiritual heritage. We want democracy to survive for all generations to come, not to become the insolvent phantom of tomorrow.”
Throughout the post-war boom, this burgeoning complexity and its professional/managerial class overseers were held in check in part by the last remnants of the old aristocracy, in part by governments led by politicians like Attlee and MacMillan who had direct and bitter experience of war, and by trade unions and social democratic parties with the power to contain untrammelled profiteering. And it goes without saying that all three of these checks on profit were the target of the neoliberal revolution.
What the neoliberals – and the ownership class they claimed to be acting for – never understood was that the checks on profiteering were in their own long-term interests as well as for the benefit of ordinary people. And with the deregulation of the western banking system in 1986, we witnessed precisely the “plundering, for their own ease and convenience, of the precious resources of tomorrow,” that Eisenhower had warned against. Even as whole swathes of ex-industrial, rundown seaside, and smalltown Britain (and their equivalents across the western economies) were laid waste, bank profits metastasised, and the fictitious “wealth” of godzillionaire tech owners grew to unimaginable highs… not uncoincidentally mirroring the equally unimaginable levels of government debt the public was left on the hook for. Just for a moment though, it seemed like the wealthiest of the professional/managerial class might obtain superstardom similar to that enjoyed by the tech godzillionaires… until it all went south.
It was the peak in conventional oil production in 2005 which pulled the rug out from beneath the system… although this is not understood by an economics clerissy which is entirely energy blind. As oil prices increased, so too did the price of just about everything else in the economy. To counter this, central bankers dusted off the econometric scrolls and alighted upon overnight interest rates as the quack “cure” for what they wrongly called “inflation.” And so, instead of facing just one crisis – a supply shock resulting in rising prices – businesses and households across the debt-based economies of the west had to battle a second – rising cost of borrowing – crisis. It was sufficient to cause businesses to fail and force mortgage payers who had previously been getting by, into arrears.
They tried to blame it on “sub-prime” borrowers and the independent mortgage brokers who sold them their loans. But it was really a banking and finance sector reaching “peak debt,” and whose primary interest was in short-term plundering, in the course of which it was prepared to build mountains of unrepayable derivative obligations on the entirely unrealistic assumption that economic growth would continue forever. But, of course and as Eisenhower had warned, in the neoliberal years they had, indeed, “mortgaged the material assets of our grandchildren” – including the natural environment which provides us with life support on the only habitable planet we currently know of.
Even when the professional/managerial class indicates that it is aware of the impact its activities are having on the environment, it highlights only carbon dioxide – which it has turned into a carbon credits scam – and various non-carbon energy sources through which it has scammed governments – i.e., taxpaying businesses and households – out of trillions of dollars in wasted subsidies. At no point does this – now self-replicating – “class for itself” – accept any sacrifice of its own way of life to lower a collective “carbon footprint” which it is disproportionately responsible for. Instead, it imposes ever greater costs onto populations which are already reaching the limits of affordability within economies which are collapsing as a result of the many other overshoot crises which the technocracy ignores.
We can – and many do – turn to government to demand an end to this. After all, a nation state governed by the genuine representatives of the people is the only mechanism that ordinary people have for redress. Unfortunately, that ship sailed decades ago when the majority decided that in exchange for a few paltry tax cuts, we were quite content for democracy to “become the insolvent phantom of tomorrow.” In practice, the choice we are given at elections is between the various wings of a neoliberal uniparty which, in any case, is beholden to the neoliberal technocratic supranational structures of global governance – witness French President Macron having to go cap in hand to the Brussels overlords to beg to be allowed to give temporary concessions to irate farmers just last week.
As overshoot overtakes us, and the impossibility of sustaining eight billion humans on a fast-depleting planet is proved in real time, we can but wonder if things might have turned out differently if only the ownership class which inherited the post-war economy had taken responsibility for more than just appointing self-serving technocrats to do whatever it took to expand their bank balances. Had they heeded Eisenhower’s warning and adopted a degree of the stewardship of a previous age, might things have turned out differently? Certainly, Elon Musk’s at least partially successful wresting back of Twitter from the technocrats which had been running it would suggest that the ownership class still has at least some agency… and might be prompted to act as they realise that all of their supposed financial “wealth” will evaporate in short order in the – very likely and increasingly obvious – event that the technocracy crashes the system. And from the opposite end of the class divide, the palpable fear of mass protest and populist politicians suggests that the days of technocratic rule are coming to an end one way or another.
But if not technocracy, how else might we manage the complexity of a globally interconnected oil age economy other than by reverting to a far simpler economy based around the aristocratic nation states of the Victorian age? Indeed, given that the technocratic plundering of the neoliberal decades has depleted key energy and mineral resources to the point that population decline and economic shrinking are now inevitable, even the promise of a reversion to the nation state may be inadequate to the task of de-growing complex economies. A relatively rapid, catastrophic die off followed by a return to a warlordism that would have been familiar to the ancient Britons following the collapse of Rome seems more likely.
It might be that nobody was to blame… that rapacious complexity was merely the cancerous growth of a superorganism comprised of eight billion human cells, each pursuing the diktats of prehuman dopamine systems. But if we are to blame anyone, then that ownership class which enjoyed the fruits of ownership while ignoring the many voices like Eisenhower’s against handing the keys of the kingdom to an irresponsible professional/managerial class which knows no limit, is surely more culpable than most… That is, many saw what was coming decades before it arrived. But those with the power of decision chose to look the other way.
As you made it to the end…
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