According to a recent report from the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, an organisation committed to tackling social issues in a constructive manner, the wealth gap between rich and poor is at it’s highest level in 40 years.
Amongst the findings are the widespread acceptance of the fact that some occupations should be paid at a higher rate than others, a view certainly upheld amongst many of my contempories here at college. However there appears to be a gap between what people are prepared to accept as a difference and what in reality happens.
In the words of Michael Orton who authored the report.
“There is widespread acceptance that some occupations should be paid more than others: but the gap between high and low paid occupations is far greater than people think it should be,”
I understand of course that due to competition people will be offered higher and higher levels of pay by different companies eager to get skilled people to work for them rather than the opposition. That people are surprised by the fact that if you allow for occupations to be paid at differing levels there comes about a situation whereby people get paid astronomical salaries is sympomatic of people’s willingness to accept economic conditions and values without actually questioning them or thinking too hard about the long term implications of such a system.
I will have to continue my observations later as there is an exam class taking over the computer room but check out the news article here
Cont:
What seems to be the case here is something that I have become aware of slowly but surely and that is the dogma of market fundamentalism, the overiding view that economic viability is the be all and end all of human endeavour. Despite the human cost of market fundamentalism it is a script to be stuck to with the same religious adherence as any other faith system. Adam Smith, who now adorns the £20 note, was an exceptional economist whose ideas on the division of labour are a central tenet to modern British Economics. His philosophy if he can be said to possess one was one of the intense self interest of man. ‘The butcher, baker and brewer’ ,he argued, ‘operate from their own self-love’; and you have to assume that he believed this over any other idea of human co-operation. He also argued for the metaphysical concept of ‘an invisible hand’.
This construct of optimism was the ‘guiding force’ behind the economy, an unseen power which worked towards some utopian future in which all problems would be solved, that is of course if we just left the economy alone and let it do it’s thing.
As you can imagine Smith was no lover of socialist economics.
What gets me here is that we (I include myself in this catchall) who believe in controls on the economy are usually denounced for our risible suggestions that humanity’s co-operation might help balance the economy and create some sort of paradise on earth, an admittedly fundamentalist idea in itself and yet based on the evidence that people do seem to work rather well as teams. The term is usually somewhere along the lines of optimistic and niave idealism, and yet a belief in the abilities of man to fuction as a team rather than competing enemies, seems to me to be less ridiculous than that of one of an invisible, unknown force which works towards a cornucopian vision of economic utopia.
To return this to the situation highlighted above, market fundamentalism ignores any setbacks or any evidence that it might not just be working for anyone other than a elite minority, claiming that we have to ’stick at it’ to see the showering of wealth for all much in the same vein that Millenniest religious fundamentalists claim that we must doggedly keep to our faith whatever nastiness that may entail because the rapture, the thousand year rein, is just around the corner and it would be no good giving up right now and pursuing a different path.
You only have to look at what the IMF has been responsible for in countries such a Argentina and it becomes rather clear that people holding the fundamental rules of the marketplace as the one and only ‘truth’ and that it matters not should a country face economic ruin as a result, it matters little if there appears to be gaping wealth gaps what matters is that the doctrine of market fundamentalism is upheld.
Why?
Because it benefits the powerful, it benefits this rich minority of people who perpetuate the vicious cycle by being the people who can direct where the economy goes and what goods are in demand. Just as religious fundamentalism perpetutes the power of clerics and of the church and in some cases the state, so too does Market Fundamentalism promise deliverance for our hard work whilst maintaining the authority and control of the very people who benefit the most.
This of course is only an look at the UK, and whilst we can definitively claim that there is a wealth gap, which of course there is, we can also claim that poverty is less of an endemic matter than it was back in the 1970’s. There is a fair amount of evidence to back up such a claim but you have to remember that the elite are not the idiots that Marx mistook them for back in the 19th century. Had capitalism continued to downgrade people’s lives in such a dramatic fashion until they were reliant upon scrabbling in rubbish heaps to get their tea, then a revolution would indeed have taken place.
Much better to keep the proleteriat down by throwing them the scraps of your own success, or more correctly, by turning the proleteriat into ‘consumers’, ‘mini capitalists’ who loved the system as much as the next man because they could get themselves a car, or a mobile phone, a HDTV, the possibilites were endless(?) and the market for selling goods simply exploded.
Is it so much of a bad thing for people’s quality of life to have been raised in such a way? Or is it simply the drug which keeps us all sedate whilst the ruling class continue to gallop ahead of the pack, obscenely rich, obscenely powerful?
The unfairness of our world is manifest in countless experiences that we have in this life, once upon a time with no distractions there would have been little to keep us from all realising our exploitation, rise up and sweep away our rulers (and I’m not going to claim that this would lead to anything better, but the smug bastards would be gone and Tesco Express would finally disappear). But now it is a case of ‘know the world is unfair, turn on the Television, have a beer, eat your ready meal, have another beer, go to bed and in the morning go back to work because that is the way you maintain your habit, and the habit is all there is between the distraction and the awful realisation that you are a cog in a machine being exploited by others’.
The evidence is there that our economic system is leading to a polarised society of have’s and have not’s, it’s leading to a society in which people still scramble to be part of the ‘have’s’ and never realising that they simply perpetuate the system that keeps them down. Finally you have to remember that agonistic opposition is a requirement of a liberal democracy, without any opposition to a system the system becomes tyrannical, unfettered it expands, its envelops and it smothers. Nobody questions Capitalism, ’the only morally correct system of economics which rewards those who work hard’ and as a result it consolidates its grip over each and every one of us, turning all of us into conforming puppets. Just a thought but Capitalism promotes individualism and determines that all us are different? If we are all different then how can we conform to one single economic fundamental which suits all of us?
