In a capitalist economy, ordinary citizens
serve only two functions – they can be a source of labour or consumers of products
and services. That doesn’t preclude them from being both, of course, but those
who are neither are, essentially, surplus to requirements. That’s putting it
bluntly – and most capitalist economies are overlaid with at least an element
of social democracy which seeks to mitigate and/or gloss over the worst effects
of capitalism. But the core ideological debate within UK politics is about the
degree of mitigation and gloss; not about the fundamentals. Labour is as wedded
to the underlying ideology as the Tories, they just argue about the extent of
mitigation.
Understanding that raw fact about the nature
of capitalism is core to understanding the Tory attitude towards the unemployed,
or those dependant on the state pension. They are seen as burdens, rather than full
members of society. Whilst actively culling them is a step too far, even for the
more extreme members of the current cabinet (although if a pandemic does part
of the job, that’s just serendipitous), keeping them as poor as possible comes
a close second. The fact that we have one of the lowest state pensions in the
developed world is one illustration of the attitude; yesterday’s announcement
of new benefit sanctions on the unemployed is another. The government’s ‘solution’
to a situation in which there are 1.2 million vacancies and 500,000 unemployed
is to force people into whatever jobs are available, regardless of preference
or skills, by driving them deeper into poverty if they are unemployed for more
than four weeks.
It’s an oversimplistic mathematical
approach to filling vacancies – an unemployed sales person in Devon is hardly
going to be able to fill a brain surgeon vacancy in Aberdeen (and there are an
awful lot of unfilled vacancies in the NHS); but essentially it will drive many
people, regardless of their skills or experience, into minimum wage jobs in sectors
such as care regardless of their suitability for such a role. A means of fixing
the social care crisis is something which this is not. It probably doesn’t
matter to them though – low wage labour helps the profits of private care
companies, and keeps down the cost of looking after the almost useless people
(in capitalist terms) receiving the care.
It’s not the only way of organising a
society or economy; we could instead start, as some of us do, from the basis
that the purpose of an organised economy is to serve the members of society as a
whole rather than assuming that those members exist only to serve the economy.
It’s an idea which we’ve largely lost sight of, as we’ve swallowed the tenets
of capitalist ideology. But we don’t even need to be as radical as that to see the
essentially short-sighted nature of the Tory approach. Decent pensions and
benefits – as well as paying a proper living wage – allow those currently
regarded as useless to become useful even to capitalists, as consumers. It
means spreading ‘consumption’ more evenly and fairly, but I’m sure some genius
could come up with a good slogan to cover it – something like ‘levelling up’,
maybe? Whereas failure to do so has the effect of concentrating wealth in
ever-increasing quantities in ever fewer hands.
They get away with it though. They have
managed to convince those in the middle that the problem is the poor, and
convince the poor that the problem is the even poorer. And to convince both
that immigrants are the problem. They get away with it, in short, because enough
of us allow them to.
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