The Glorious Next Ten Years?

 

Globalisation left the urban and rural working class behind.

Why?

Companies working as part of a globalised supply chain typically require specialised, highly skilled workers; firms congregate in clusters with good commercial and logistical links: famous hubs, which in the UK include Oxford, Cambridge and trendy boroughs in London.

By contrast, to poorer parts (the countryside, those left-behind cities and market towns) investment capital does not flow. The economy ticks over, supplying basic needs of a low-wage population going nowhere.

Globalised centres have plenty of money and talent; nice places to live, work and play. There are career paths to power, riches and status. These are basic human desires. But in most advanced capitalist countries, only a minority of the population participates in this globalised utopia. The sans-culottes, dispossessed of their present and future, are alienated, restive and mutinous. Populist leaders, disgruntled members of the elite hungry for dominance of their own, emerge to champion their grievances. They promise to level things up.

In fact there are two restive subpopulations, reflecting the massive bifurcation of the working class over the last sixty years: non-graduate manual/low-skill workers; and the mass-produced graduates who aspire to higher things.

Today, the non-graduates (the traditional manual workers) are the engine of classical populism on the political right: gilets jaunes and RN, Trump voters, AFD, Nigel Farage supporters in the UK. Their lives and livelihoods are localised in their often-crumbling communities which they seek to defend and restore. They are the ‘somewheres’.

The mass-produced graduates, by contrast, have fuelled left-wing protests since the sixties. These people are the results of university expansion, of potential-elite overproduction. They are the educated but surplus: the impoverished baristas, penniless artists and toilers at ‘bullshit jobs’. They are the subjects of authors such as Sally Rooney.

They aspire to the dream - but there are not many suitable niches available and these go to the connected, the talented and the lucky few. The graduate-masses, frustrated, deploy their progressive ideas as communal signifiers, hoping to righteously topple elite incumbents and replace them. 

Dream on!

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A note about progressive ideology. Although often blamed on Marxism, it's really a natural fit to globalised capitalism, but not a good fit for historical human nature.

For most of history (and prehistory) people lived in stable communities where everyone knew everyone else and personal trust networks mediated transactions. Strangers were viewed with justifiable suspicion until they had proved themselves. The ideology called 'communitarianism'.

Cities and large-scale commerce changed all that. At professional and elite levels people spend their time, a lot of it, dealing with strangers. A bland, prosocial persona is a precondition of success. Career routes filter out those incapable of the desired extraversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness and calmness, as well as rewarding intelligence and openness to experience.

The politics of the elite ‘anywhere’ personality type is progressivism: it's cool and detached, compassionate in the abstract, egalitarian not domineering. It values strangers.

As judged by traditional cultural standards however, it's feminised, wimpish and weak: the rabbit in the headlights look when confronted by masculine aggression. Stand up Jeremy Hunt.

I wrote about genetic selection for this elite trait-constellation in my previous post (‘Elites are not like us’).

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Across the advanced capitalist countries the fortunes of the anywhere-elites have decoupled both from the ‘somewhere’ uncredentialed workers and the ‘anywhere’ precariat of graduate aspirants. The forces of the ‘extreme’ right and left are now resurgent. The ‘moderate centre’ struggles to hold, wouldn't you say, M. Macron? "President of the rich"?

There have been periods when capitalism developed hand-in-hand with social cohesion: les trente glorieuses. But that period in the fifties and sixties was powered by mass blue-collar manufacturing and labour-intensive white-collar work (teachers, clerks, junior managers).

Capitalism continues to automate, and to concentrate - in just a few locations - a diminishing need for those kinds of jobs. Consequently labour market demand has dried up while the supply of workers fitted to those kinds of jobs has not. Call Centres and Distribution Depots are not a satisfying substitute.

If it was easy to fix it would have been.

Growth (easy to say) is the rising tide which lifts all boats (but not all equally - those mass industrial/bureaucratic jobs are not coming back). But growth increases the size of the total ecosystem of services. Places where the non-elite can find occupations which, at least to some extent, can match their goals.

It's not a panacea but perhaps the new UK Labour government is on the right track after all? Time to embrace creative destruction, comrades!