Getting a Handle on the Gulf Disaster

Via I discover the rather wonderful 'If it Was My Home' website. Simple idea really: just move the slick to be centred on your home - with the size and shape changed according to real time data at least once every day.

Update 10th June: blimey, it's reached Bristol, Bournemouth and Milton Keynes now, with Cardiff and Calais pretty certain to go under by the end of the week I'd say.

When Capital Gives A Business Away

There's a really interesting post over at orgtheory on the situation at Chrysler in the States by Sean Stafford. The firm is all but bankrupt - and part of the bailout deal leaves the United Auto Workers Union as the majority shareholder. Surely a step towards the kind of worker co-op based strategy so forcefully advocated by the likes of Boffy?

But Stafford warns that this is not unalloyed good news, and could actually leave the Union with a huge retiree health bill if the firm does tank completely. In other words, they could be stuck with a 'pig in a poke'- the capitalists, having basically decided the North American auto industry is on its uppers, have passed an unproductive asset to the workforce. (I paraphrase and crudify). He goes further:

"...worker voice today comes in multiple forms and many of these rely less on the blunt instruments of countervailing power than on the relatively softer instruments of building alliances, framing issues, participating on multiple levels (workplace, community, identity groups, local and national governments, the media, international)."

Well, perhaps, yes, sort of. But 'worker voice' must also be developed in actually deciding what can be produced to meet social need. So I'd really like to know if the lefty engineers and technologists of this world are heading Detroit-wards to help the UAW develop their very own 'Lucas Aerospace Shop Stewards Plan' on a huge scale to convert the production lines from gas guzzlers to a mixture of ecologically sound vehicles and alternative products.

Because, otherwise, I think the UAW may regret this deal.

Green Socialist Thinking: As All-American As......

A poster called Sandwich Man on Econospeak reveals Benjamin Franklin to be an unexpected devotee of the green and simple life. Yeah, that Benjamin Franklin - him on the $100 dollar bill. Apparently, our Ben was no fan of the injunction to 'accumulate, accumulate':

"It has been computed by some political arithmetician, that, if every man and woman would work for four hours each day on something useful, that labour would produce sufficient to procure all the necessaries and comforts of life: want and misery would be banished out of the world, and the rest of the twenty-four hours might be leisure and pleasure.

What occasions then so much want and misery? It is the employment of men and women in works that produce neither the necessaries nor conveniences of life, who, with those who do nothing, consume necessaries raised by the laborious...

Look round the world, and see the millions employed in doing nothing, or in something that amounts to nothing, when the necessaries and conveniences of life are in question. What is the bulk of commerce, for which we fight and destroy each other but the toil of millions for superfluities, to the great hazard and loss of many lives by the constant dangers of the sea?...

A question may be asked; Could all these people now employed in raising, making, or carrying superfluities, be subsisted by raising necessaries? I think they might....

It is, however, some comfort to reflect that, upon the whole, the quantity of industry and prudence among mankind exceeds the quantity of idleness and folly....

One reflection more, and I will end this long rambling letter... Our eyes, though exceeding useful, ask, when reasonable, only the cheap assistance of spectacles, which could not much impair our finances. But the eyes of other people are the eyes that ruin us. If all but myself were blind, I should want neither fine clothes, fine houses, nor fine furniture."(letter to Benjamin Vaughn, dated July 1784)

Crisis? What Crisis?

Crisis. It's such a convenient word, isn't it? Perhaps that's part of the problem. Everyone uses it and everyone means slightly different things by it. So folk on the Right like David Moller can quite easily and correctly say of the current financial crisis that,

" In marked distinction from those wearying arguments of the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s, it would seem that that great knockabout debate on capitalism versus communism has been put to one side."

Capitalism, on this view, isn't in crisis; it's just undergoing one of its necessary periodic convulsions prior to resuming its upswing. It's just the normal business cycle writ a little larger than usual. Some Marxist economists seem to agree, implying that the current problems are a dramatic, but containable, wobble in a new Kondratiev Long Wave Boom.

But I would argue we are facing three very closely interlinked structural problems, each of which, on its own, has the capacity to spiral out of control Long Wave or no Long Wave.

Firstly,we have a systematic failure of the heartland of the global financial system which is now spilling over into a more general economic crisis as unemployment figures rise across the developed world and trade volumes plummet. A response will come from the people hurt by this. Given that the Forward March of Labour has long Halted, this might amount to no more than a spate of possibly dramatic but politically superficial riots. A few governments might fall, as in Iceland, but that doesn't necessarily mean anything meaningful will have changed. Well nothing except one thing: the idea that we live in the best of all possible worlds ...the search for alternatives, however long and arduous the process, will be given new impetus.

Secondly, however, the financial crisis is intimately tied to a shift in geo-political power: put plainly North America is getting relatively poorer and the BRIC countries, especially China, and the oil producers are getting relatively and absolutely richer. People like John Ross say it is the imbalance in savings/investment and consumption between these two blocs that is at the heart of the current crisis. Indeed, America has been living high off the hog on China's savings. There's a stalemate here at the moment; China owns so much of America it doesn't want the dollar to fail, and pulling its money out - even if there was another safer currency to put it into - would automatically start that process. But this 'balance of financial terror' might not last for ever. In fact I'd be really surprised if it did. After the current credit crunch is over, China isn't going to be pouring its money back into Wall St again with such gay abandon. It's going to hedge, diversify - and perhaps even focus on domestic development, not foreign investment. & at the back of my mind is the unpleasant thought that the ownership of Top Dog Nation status rarely changes hands without some kind of armed conflict, even if that all seems a million miles away today.

Thirdly, the environmental crisis rumbles on. I am not one of those who believe that capitalism is solely responsible for this - I remember all those wasted cotton fields in Soviet Central Asia - but, to put it as mildly as possible, we're talking about those famous market signals of neo-liberalism taking a bloody long time to price in the destruction of our habitat, aren't we? What was that someone mumbled at the back about 'the Tragedy of the Commons'? This one isn't going away and is, of course, intimately connected to the whole question of the economic rise of the BRIC countries as well as the wasteful habits of the West. It remains to be seen whether even the forceful upward swing of a Kondratiev Long Wave - assuming that they exist, which is disputed - can counteract environmental disaster.

None of this means capitalism is going to collapse. It doesn't even necessarily mean it's going to be widely questioned, at least in the short run. It does mean however, there is no feasible return to 'glad confident morning' for the snake oil salesmen of the flat world of globalisation.

What capitalism now has, even though some are afraid to admit it, is a crisis of confidence in its own powers. & it's right to have such doubts.

Stories From My Youth (no 3291): Goodbye Gasometers

When I was approaching my early teens the country went through a massive infrastructural change: thousands of gasometers came down and all the gas pipes were changed to take North Sea gas which had some mysteriously different quality to the previously used coal gas.

Can't we have a similar programme written into the budget which goes for universal house insulation? Surely it is the perfect Keynesian counter-cyclical measure:

• It is a one-off capital project;
• It would be labour intensive at time of rising unemployment;
• It would spread employment opportunities to where people actually live, not require them to move; and
• It would leave the country with a vital strategic heritage of reduced Co2 omissions.

What's not to like? (Apart from the cost of course - but, hey, as we've seen with the banks, what's a few billion between friends?)

Red and Green

Paulie directs his readers to a Liberal Conspiracy debate over the car bail outs. Is the difference between Left and Green simply over the the relative importance they attach to jobs per se, rather than a wider sense of 'the good life'? Does the green movement have a tin-ear for workers' concerns? Conversely: has the Labour Movement, and most especially it's left, lost all touch with the difference between sectional interests, albeit those of the oppressed and disadvantaged, and the broader good ? (even if that 'broader good' is expressed in classic terms of 'the working class as a whole' in some more traditional quarters....or even if the more jargon ridden amongst them might describe a Left vision of the 'broader good' as being a 'hegemonic aspiration'. ).


The answer to every one of these questions, it seems to me, is a 'yes' with a variety of different qualifiers. Therein lies the problem for anyone with a spark of radicalism in them.

Leftism surely can't mean conservatism. It can't mean, to take a non-ecologically relevant example, supporting the absurd 'People's Woolworth's' campaign. Woolworths was a crap store selling crap things. I do not mourn its passing. The issue is finding a quick transition into new work for its employees, not pretending it should be saved for the nation. Calls for TU action beyond this are blinkered in my view. Socialism has to mean progress of some sort, surely?

Yet the Greens need to find of a way of concretising their call for industrial and commercial transformation. The Green New Deal is fine as far as it goes - but it's high level Keynesianism at root. Even if it was a adequate programme to confront the crisis - and, remember, it was designed before the worst of the credit crunch - it is an inherently top-down series of measures. People - workers and their organisations - need to be able to contribute.

At this point, lets remember not just Mike Cooley and his fellow Shop Stewards at Lucas Areospace, but also what came out of it: a Centre for Alternative Industrial and Technological Systems (CAITS). I can't find it on Google any more - perhaps it's folded, which would be very sad. Instead we have the purely Green Centre for Alternative Technology, which even boasts of being visited by the Duke of Edinburgh....

The Left and the Greens need each other, and need each other badly. Neither has a workable vision of the future without the other.

First Time as Tragedy, Second Time As....?

The big American car makers, the backbone of their industrial dominance for almost a century, are in trouble. Obama is under pressure - which he will, inevitably, bow to in some way - to save them through an injection of tax payers money. What constitutes a 'Leftwing' approach to this? I have two thoughts.

Firstly, for a Brit of a certain age, there are inescapable reminders of the long, painful decline of British Leyland. For all the endless re-organisation and cumulative nationalisations the basic problem was never faced: the need to modernise and retool for a different age. Throughout the seventies and early eighties, BL always had old fashioned products produced in an old fashioned way. This was, of course, primarily a failure of management and governments - but it is also true that the BL unions never once glimpsed the possibility of an alterative future in the way that the Lucas Aerospace Shop Stewards Alternative Plan did. Looking back it is hard to avoid the conclusion that this lack of an alternative industrial strategy made the successive ‘rescue’ plans all little more than a series of temporary sticking plasters. Nationalisation alone is not enough. Why should any American bail out of their car industry follow a different path?

Secondly, this is not the 1970s: almost all versions of the Left would wish to recognise green concerns. To what extent are such concerns compatible with saving the automobile industry? Sure, any bail out could be made conditional on the car makers switching away from SUVs towards hybrids and so forth. But a bigger change than this is surely needed. Mass public transport is surely the priority, not further production of cars. So what else can large scale car plants actually produce and how would they fit into any Green New Deal? Because the eventual closing, or very significant down sizing, of these kinds of facilities has got to be an option in the medium term. So either they can produce other things or, in the not too distant future, they have to go....and 'bail out' monies might be better spent creating alternative employment opportunities.

The Commentariat Rearranges Itself

The world shifts: even the Telegraph is moved to suggest it would be nice if someone from the banking world said 'sorry'. Ahh, isn't that nice....and John Redwood - he of the Ming the Mekon stare – busies himself with details of the government's action in stabilising the markets, rather than launching a blood and thunder ideological criticism.

Back in the world of the grown-ups, Polly T, nose-peg hawker in chief and once of the Social Democratic Party for christssakes, tells us,

"Brown needs a severe committee of those economists who were right when he was wrong - people to frighten the City, not to soothe its frightened feathers. Appoint the Richard Murphys, Will Huttons and Larry Elliotts not as City tsars but as City Savonarolas to flush out tax avoidance and evasion, to close down tax havens, to appoint honest non-executives to company boardrooms and institute a regime built on public trust." I take this to mean that the principled section of New Labour is now thoroughly disgusted with the City and, finally - finally – prepared to occasionally say 'boo' to this particular goose.

Chris Dillow continues Stumbling and Mumbling towards a theory of market driven mutual ownership. Will Hutton grimly explains how much remains to be done. Richard Murphy unpacks Hutton's idea of 'putting all the debt in a bad bank' might actually work: interestingly, given his association with the Labour Representation Committee, he does seem to call for a fairly rapid sale of the profitable bits of the banks back to the private sector. So we're still talking, even on the apparent 'extreme Left' of the public discussion, about a rebalanced mixed economy.

Which allows Lenin's Tomb to draw a thick red line between his position and mainstream discussion, based on the abolition of scarcity and workplace, rather than representational, democracy. By abolishing scarcity ,of course, one more or less abolishes the need for any kind of 'bourgeois' economics: it's a long way from agreeing that capitalism creates 'artificial' needs , a view which I agree with, and saying scarcity itself can be abolished...which is perhaps why there is only a very desultory discussion over at Dave's Part on whether Marxist economics offers any particular insight to the crisis.

So, all in all, I think John Lancaster is probably right: capitalism no longer has a global antagonist.

Except, Monbiot tell us, capitalism and the globe may not be on speaking terms for very much longer...

(Hattip to L+C for the picture)