Following on from the last excerpt posted yesterday, it describes situations in the late 1980s when the book was written but there is a lot that sounds like current discussions in the United States. A similar scheme of youth employment has been discussed in some states, even as education, social services and welfare are cut.
So very much depends on a poor man's wage. At present there is a Youth Training Scheme in Britain to absorb the energies of unemployed school-leavers. Industries are encouraged to take on trainees in place of regular hiring. These youths are paid by the government at wages that about equal the dole. In other words, the government donates to industry the free use of unskilled labor. Without reference to the wealth these young people produce, their subsistence is counted as welfare spending, and they are thought of as the beneficiaries of this arrangement, from which it is hoped they will learn the value of honest work.
People in their teens are historically the most coveted workers in the British economy. They are relatively healthy, and from the government's point of view, they are cheap, because they have no dependents and normally live with their families. This scheme merely reproduces the ancient pattern, severing work from pay, making the wage a charity, while reducing work to an escape from the opprobrium of idleness.
Britain invests more money abroad per capita than any other country, and invested more in absolute terms, util Japan surpassed it in this decade. Those who control capital, whether banks or industries of the government itself, have always had the means to punish or starve policies they disapprove of, or to crown with success policies friendlier to their interests simply by leaving money at home or by siphoning it off to the United States or to South Africa or elsewhere.
Mrs. Thatcher was described in an essay by Bernard D. Nossiter in The New York Times (June 15, 1988* as arguing to a church assembly "that abundance, the rich, were blessed while poverty, the poor were not, and Creation proves it."
She has her reward. Britain is experiencing economic growth, of the hectic, selective, up-market kind which does not threaten to drive upward the cost of industrial labor or the demand of social services. British economics is a game of keep-away. Whence all the jiggling of statistics - it is easy to get a big percentage increase from a very small base, as in calculating wages and pensions, and it is easy to take away with one hand what is given with the other, to raise wages a little and cut benefits more, and it is easy to increase rates of saving and contribution to private pension plans by reducing benefits for the elderly or cutting back on the administration needed to deliver them or adding to the obstacles involved in obtaining them or threatening to phase them out altogether, as the Thatcher government has done.
Ralf Dahrendorf, in his book On Britain, quotes respectfully as follows from a book titled Equality, coauthored by Keith Joseph, an important figure in the Thatcher government: "Ultimately the capacity of any society to look after its poor is dependent on the total amount of its wealth, however distributed." One might object that the way in which wealth is distributed determines, in a society, how numerous "its poor" will be. To distribute wealth away from employed people, as the British do, creates poverty, which must be looked after, perpetuating the ancient relation of those who work to those who employ, which has analogues, or cousins, in slavery and forced labor.
Marilynne Robinson's contention that the Poor Law is still present or, at least, always threatens to be resurrected in Britain is clear. The language of it seems to be almost unconsciously encoded in the way we talk about work, wealth and economic rightness. We seemed to be learning new ways to think about those and talk about them, to break out of the Poor Law form of slavery. My fear is that has been regaining a presence in American thought since the Reagan administration and that, now, our "liberals" in the Democratic Party sound like conservatives of the 1930s.
[Note 2014, this debate over raising the minimum wage is still going on in Washington and state capitals around the country.] This week as Nancy Pelosi proposes to raise the minimum wage again, to certain opposition with the usual arguments that paying a fair wage inhibits employment, as the stock market floats to new highs over the stagnant unemployment figures and in a week after we found out who the worlds biggest billionaires are (with some having more than fifty billion dollars in personal wealth), How we've gotten to where we are and the kind of barely realized assumptions that allow us to tolerate it are worth thinking about very hard.
Update: Intellectual Materialism Is Just Sugar Poured On Vulgar Materialism
One of the worst successes of the rich and powerful is the extent to which they have gulled people, including themselves, into believing that the artificial rules for appropriating the products of other peoples' labor are laws of nature and, by sheer force of habituation, convince people that that is how things are, always were and always will be. The formation of habits in people who will accept injustice done to them is one of the most potent of means of oppression and injustice. The history of materialism, even that materialism which may have originally aspired to liberate workers from that system, is one of reinforcing the habits of taking that injustice as an atavistic fact of life. It was one of the bigger surprises I had over the past decade to realize that the habits that produce materialism are the same habits of thought that produce the ruthless treatment of people, animals, the biosphere as objects of commerce, including the habits that lead to that materialism allegedly of the left.
Justice depends on a transcendent view of life. If there is a law of nature involved, that is it. Whenever a life or life in general is seen in mechanical materialistic terms, justice will be pushed aside. Whenever justice is pushed aside, you will find vulgar materialism at the bottom of it. I have come to believe that the motives of intellectuals adopting materialism are, in every case I've looked at, based in motives of personal enrichment and the hope of social and financial advancement. That there may be other motives is possible but, based in what I've looked closely at, I think those must be quite rare.
One of the worst successes of the rich and powerful is the extent to which they have gulled people, including themselves, into believing that the artificial rules for appropriating the products of other peoples' labor are laws of nature and, by sheer force of habituation, convince people that that is how things are, always were and always will be.
ReplyDeleteI would slightly amend this, to say the argument is that this is how things should be, that such an arrangement produces the best of all possible worlds, the "greatest good for the greatest number," and any deviation from it will mean desolation, ruin, and being cast out of the Garden of Eden we've made for ourselves here.
That, at least, is the American variation. You hear it in the arguments that we have the "best healthcare system in the world." And then someone who says that is confronted with the reality of healthcare in America, which is good if you can afford it, sucks if you can't; and, as The Daily Show did to one such person recently, that person is stopped dead in their pontificating.
But they don't change their mind. Too invested in the system as it is. Indeed, reading Robinson's words I struggled with her idea of wealth distribution, until I realized what she was saying was the distribution itself is a function of the system, not of the people in the system, and it is the system that is at fault, but also the system that excuses us from responsibility (we are so good at disavowing responsibility). The system is so ingrained that even when you know it is wrong, you have to look again and again to keep from thinking the system just needs the amelioration of the law, or goodwill, or charity, to make it finally work as it should.
I keep coming back to Brueggeman's "theology of scarcity." It is the best fundamental explanation that I have, and it is grounded in an understanding that Creation comes from God (which gives God a relationship to the Creation, if only as the Creator) and the Creation is good, with enough for everyone. But the "theology of scarcity" says there is not enough, and you must hoard what you have (like the atheist/scientist who recently said his ethic was to take care of his family first, and if there is enough comity, supplies, etc., for others, well then maybe we can build a society. Man, these people are idiots. As if a society can exist only so long as we are all comfortable, and the moment that comfort is threatened, it's anarchy for everybody, and every man for himself in a war of all against all. Funny nothing like that ever happens locally when there's a natural disaster. No portion of the U.S. which would seem most likely to collapse like a startled soufflé ever descends into anarchy and chaos following a flood or a tornado or a hurricane. Maybe this ethics thing is more complicated than that idiot surmises, huh?)
Well, I've talked too much and lost the thread, again. Suffice to say that to replace the system we must see clearly what is fundamentally wrong with it, and for me the analysis that supports the idea of a "theology of scarcity/abundance" is the key.