So here I am, a humanities graduate student who has read Fifty Shades of Grey at least five or six times in its entirety. I have swaths of creepy badly-written sex scenes basically memorized. I know by heart the number of times “Audi” is used in the second book. Thanks to its appearance on pretty much every page, the only interjection I use anymore is “Holy cow!” And all because people decided to laugh when I said that something terrible was worth studying. In fact, I’d argue that something this terrible is more worthy of study than a lot of other things I’ve researched in the past. There are hundreds of thousands of other romance novels in the world, but no other series has gotten this kind of circulation. Why? I don’t know if I have an answer, but I do have a suggestion for one kind of cultural idea that it is not only reflecting or reinforcing, but actively participating in: consumerism. What follows is my love letter to the apparently revolutionary idea that something can be both absolutely awful and extremely culturally significant.

“Do you have a philosophy? If so, what is it?”

“I don’t have a philosophy as such. Maybe a guiding principle – Carnegie’s: ‘A man who acquires the ability to take full possession of his own mind may take possession of anything else to which he is justly                                  entitled.’ I’m very singular, driven. I like control – of myself and those around me.”

“So you want to possess things?” You are a control freak.

“I want to deserve to possess them, but yes, bottom line, I do.”

“You sound like the ultimate consumer.”

“I am.”[1]

Provenance

The Fifty Shades series was originally distributed online as a piece of fan fiction[2] in two parts called Master of the Universe. Using the characters from the Twilight series, Master of the Universe told the story of a woman who falls in love with a young millionaire and their developing BDSM relationship. When it rapidly grew in popularity, the author renamed all the characters, split the first book into two, and published it as a trilogy called Fifty Shades of Grey, Fifty Shades Darker, and Fifty Shades Freed. The trilogy has achieved remarkable circulation, selling over 60 million copies.[3]

For obvious reasons, most public discussion about Fifty Shades focuses on the romantic and sexual relationship between the two main characters (Anastasia Steele and Christian Grey). There has been little attention paid to how the books are situated within culture, apart from a lot of mom jokes. On close reading, it becomes apparent that much of the narrative focuses not on the characters’ sexual relationship, but on Christian’s identity as an entrepreneur and member of the upper class. Anastasia, who begins the books as a standard middle-class college graduate, becomes over the course of the books the same kind of upper class consumer.

The Fifty Shades series is not only a product of consumer culture, but a participant in a cultural cycle. It contains a distinct social universe that is then circulated and disseminated widely throughout the culture that produced it. Branding and materiality are deployed as narrative tools that influence readers and effect real socioeconomic change on the world outside the novels. The series’ constant association of happiness, sexuality, and material ownership is a simultaneous product and construction of modern consumerism. The resolution of the plot depends on Anastasia’s final transformation into a consumer; her final domination by Christian is not only sexual, but cultural and financial.

Consumer Culture and Literature

Consumer culture here is “a type of material culture, that is, a culture of the use or appropriation of objects or things” in which the “consumer emerges as an identity.”[4]  While the idea of consumption implies the using up or depletion of resources, critical study of consumer culture focuses on “the significance and character of the values, norms, and meanings produced in [practices of consumption]…Material goods are not only used to do things, but they also have a meaning, and act as meaningful markers of social relations. It is in acquiring, using and exchanging things that individuals come to have social lives.”[5] Lury traces the roots of modern western consumerism to the Industrial Revolution, a “revolution in consumption.”[6] Mass production practices made possible the emulation of nobility through the purchase of luxury goods. Lury also emphasizes the importance of not only consumerism but the cultural cycle; and the “prosumer” as a participant in both consumption and production.[7]

James Annesley’s Blank Fictions: Consumerism, Culture and the Contemporary Novel explores the literary response to consumer culture through “blank fiction” authors such as Bret Easton Ellis, who utilize excesses of violence, sex, brands, and cultural reference points to critically engage – or disengage – with western consumer culture. Graphic sexual scenes link violence and commercialism, and “speak of a culture in which the need to objectify is of paramount importance.”[8] An excess of brands and mass cultural references serves “only as the sign of an empty, impotent postmodern culture.”[9]

The Fifty Shades series includes most of the hallmarks of consumer culture and blank fiction. It is littered with references to popular culture, e.g.: “He presses a button, and the Kings of Leon start singing”;[10] “‘I’ll have a gin and tonic,’ Christian says. ‘Hendricks if you have it or Bombay Sapphire. Cucumber with the Hendricks, lime with the Bombay’”;[11] “Opening the case, I find an iPad. Holy shit . . . an iPad.”[12]  References to products sometimes appear in the course of graphic sex scenes, e.g.: “His dark copper hair is a mess, his shirt hanging out – his gray eyes bold and dazzling. He steps out of his Converse shoes and reaches down and takes his socks off individually”;[13] “’Don’t leave me again,’ he implores, looking deep into my eyes, his face serious. ‘Okay,’ I whisper and smile at him. His answering smile is dazzling; relief, elation, and boyish delight combined into one enchanting look that would melt the coldest of hearts. ‘Thank you for the iPad.’”[14] Unlike blank fiction, Fifty Shades is not a critical engagement with consumer culture, but a celebration of it.

Situating Fifty Shades in a consumer cycle is best served by, as Terry Eagleton suggests, moving beyond the idea that literature is a “direct image of social conditions.”[15] Fifty Shades is a prosumer object, a product of consumer culture but also an actor within it. Branding serves important narrative functions in Fifty Shades, notably the development of character identity and the resolution of the plot’s tension. While the explicit narrative arc in Fifty Shades is about the main characters’ sexual and romantic relationship, this narrative is shaped by and tied to an implicit narrative that heroizes entrepreneurship and rugged individualism, and closes with Anastasia’s transformation into a successful prosumer.

Branded Narrative

Over 50 individual brands and products are mentioned by name throughout the Fifty Shades series, including vehicles, alcohol, clothing designers, and technology.[16] The number increases to over 100 if classical composers, musical artists, and local landmarks in Portland and Seattle are added. Brands and products are heavily incorporated into the text: “Lying down on the bed, I gaze at my Mac, my iPad, and my Blackberry. I am overwhelmed with technology. I set about transferring Christian’s playlist from my iPad to the Mac, then fire up Google to surf the net.”[17] While many of the brands receive only one or two mentions, there are at least three brands that receive over 40 mentions throughout the series, and one that receives 130 mentions over the course of all three books. Table 1 shows some of the most common brand names used in the Fifty Shades series.

Table 1: Common brands in Fifty Shades

Branding in the books is so ubiquitous that frequency of mention directly corresponds to narrative arc. After Christian buys Anastasia a BlackBerry, much of the story takes place via their e-mail communications. He also buys her an Audi A3 to replace her old Beetle (and later, an R8). Their first meeting is at the Heathman Hotel, where he is staying in Portland; the resurgence of the mentions of the Heathman in the third book occur during flashbacks and reminiscing about their first meeting. Finally,  Dodge is the brand of vehicle driven by Jack Hyde, the antagonist in the second and third books.

Consumer Identity

Identity in Fifty Shades is developed through branding. The three most notable examples are Christian Grey, who is linked to high-price brands; antagonist Jack Hyde, linked to working-class brands and activities; and protagonist Anastasia, who begins the series with little branding and throughout the story is transformed into a high-price consumer like Christian. This branded characterization is also closely linked to the sexual interactions between the characters.

Christian is not only a sexual Dominant, but also a millionaire who started his own company at twenty-one after being adopted out of an abusive home. By his own reckoning he employs over forty thousand people and earns “roughly one hundred thousand dollars an hour.”[18] The story of Christian’s upbringing is a classic American narrative of rugged individualism, emphasized further by his dialogue: “So are you going to invite me in, or am I to be sent packing for exercising my democratic right as an American citizen, entrepreneur, and consumer to purchase whatever I damn well please?”[19] He explicitly refers to Ana as his asset: “‘Don’t be mad. You’re so precious to me. Like a priceless asset, like a child,’ he whispers, a somber reverent expression on his face.”[20]

Christian’s socioeconomic status is heavily branded by traditional signs of status. Many of the vehicles mentioned throughout the books are his; he drives an Audi R8 and flies a Eurocopter. High-end brands are explicitly linked to social status in his dialogue:

He summons the waiter. “Two bottles of the Cristal please. The 2002 if you have it.”

I smirk at him.

“What?” he asks.

“Because the 2002 is so much better than the 2003,” I tease.

He laughs. “To the discerning palate, Anastasia.”[21]

Christian’s foil is Jack Hyde, the antagonist introduced in the second book. While both were abandoned as children and ended up at Ivy League schools, Jack Hyde failed at establishing the same kind of financial empire as Christian. His attempted sexual assault of Anastasia is wrapped up in his attempt to blackmail Christian; while both he and Christian attempt sexual and economic domination, Jack fails to do so through the appropriate channels. Jack is working-class, and is associated with brands with lower price tags than Christian. He drives a Dodge, smokes Camels, and drinks Bud beer.

Anastasia begins the books as both a sexual and consumer blank slate. At 23, she is a virgin who has only been kissed twice and has never used a computer. Her main hobby is reading old books, and her sole significant possession is a Beetle nicknamed “Wanda.” Her relationship to her possessions is an intimate one; she values her books for their contents, and her car because it was a gift from her stepfather. Anastasia goes through a three-stage transformation: from nonparticipant in consumer culture, to Christian’s economic “possession,” and finally to a full prosumer. This is mirrored in her transformation from sexual virgin, to contracted submissive, to equal sexual and romantic partner.

Transformative Gift-Giving

Gift-giving rituals are an important part of developing identity through consumerism. Movement of goods is a “movement of meanings,” because gifts “possess the meaningful properties [the gift-giver] wishes to see transferred to the gift-receiver.”[22] In Fifty Shades, gift-giving is the mode by which Christian encourages Ana’s consumerism. His first round of gifts imbues her with commodity properties, including an emphasis on keeping her safe. After she settles into a position as one of his “assets,” his gifts instead begin to groom her to join him in his position as a wealthy prosumer.

The most obvious example of this transition is Anastasia’s changing vehicles. Her Beetle has sentimental value, but Christian does not approve of this “deathtrap [she calls] a car.”[23]  He replaces the Beetle with an Audi A3, which he buys for all of his submissives because “it’s one of the safest cars in its class.”[24] While driving the Audi, Ana notices that it’s more appropriate for her position as a submissive: “I can drive the Audi in high-heels…I check my seldom-worn mascara in the light up vanity mirror on my sunshield. Didn’t have one of those in the Beetle.”[25] She later nicknames it the “submissive special.” In the third book, Christian replaces the A3 with an R8 – the same car he drives – demarcating her transformation into a full economic agent. Anastasia’s employment follows the same three-step trend: Anastasia begins the book as an unemployed writer and gets a job at a publishing agency that Christian then purchases. In the third book, he gifts her the publishing agency, transforming her from one of his assets into an entrepreneur and prosumer like him: “No, you are not an asset, you are my beloved wife.”[26]

Conclusions and Effects of Fifty Shades

The frequency of brand use in Fifty Shades has not gone entirely unnoticed by readers. Searching over 14,000 user reviews of the first book for “product placement” yields 4 results. One reviewer writes, “The author must have shares in Blackberry and Audi.”[27] Other users add that the product placement is “atrocious”[28] and “immense”[29], and that the book is “one big commercial for Audi, Converse, Twinings Tea.”[30]

While it is tempting to assume that brands paid for product placement in the books, one of the main brands – Audi – maintains that it “did not pay a dime to be part of the book series…and were stunned when they found out about the write-in of the cars.”[31] In fact, an attempt to create a “Shades of Romance” package including a drive through landmarks mentioned in the books in an Audi was shut down after Audi received a “call about copyrights.”[32] One article calls Audi’s appearance a “totally organically branded-placement that came about merely because Audi stayed true to its brand positioning as the high-end, luxury car of choice for users who want both design and performance.”[33] An Audi manager anecdotally attributes the company’s 28% increase in sales this July to the books.[34]

Audi is not the only brand that received a real-world sales boost from an “organic” product placement. Thomas Tallis, a classical composer whose music is featured in the books, shot up to the number one classical slot in the UK this year.[35] Sex shop Babeland has started selling the sex toys mentioned in the books in a Fifty Shades section on their website, and hosting workshops on “how to bring their ‘Fifty Shades’ daydreams to life.”[36] Cultural references in Fifty Shades have a measurable real-world economic effect; the book series is not only a reflection of the importance of commodities in consumer culture, but it also plays an active role in producing and influencing consumer culture,

The Fifty Shades series is what Lury refers to as a “prosumer” object.  Brands and material consumerism are closely linked to narrative arc and identity in the world of the novels, and this “organic advertising” is manifested in the world outside the book through measurable economic changes. Because the books are so widely-read, it is useful to remain cognizant of their underlying meanings and effects. Rather than simply dismissing the series as just another set of erotic novels, it is important to understand the cultural mechanisms at work in shaping the narrative and the reader response. Understanding popular literature as an active agent in consumer culture opens up new paths for studying books as participants in cultural processes, rather than static objects that only engage with culture at a critical distance.

Stripped of any true ethical status, this type of leftist ties his or her self not to the world but to ideals, categorizations or pre-prescribed identities. The material consequences of their actions never feature in their mind. Instead their actions and communication are nothing more than an affirmation of an identity; ‘the progressive’, ‘the socialist’, ‘the lefty’ and so on. Of course, it’s a cause of little wonder that this type of leftist ends up spending hours and hours asking what it means to be a socialist or a progressive today because ultimately they have no idea nor do they spend any real time thinking about how to live in such a way materially. We see variations of the “Be the change you want to see in the world!” being expressed as if ultimately ideas organically change the world without any negative consequences. They can not point to actions or a deeper analysis to explain their politics, because ultimately it is nothing more than a vacuous label for them.

This stance is pure egoism. In their roles they claim to represent others and claim to want to fight for the representation of everyone but when others make legitimate criticisms of their work they resort to affirming their own role. They speak of individuals freely sharing opinions and they speak of rational and free debate in an attempt to obscure the ways they are elevated within their own roles. This isn’t the realm of Habermas, it’s a place in which millions of people in each country will never have a chance to express themselves or their conditions to the people. Rather they must settle for having derogatory bourgeois discourses written upon them and watch as the authors are hailed as progressive champions.

All this has taken on a quite different dimension over the last week or so. This week, like many of you, I watched the US election. In search of coverage which avoided the politico coverage of “Both parties are radically different!” and Sorkinesque nationalism, I ended up settling for Democracy Now. It was by no means lacking in sentiment but something quite sad emerged. Almost all of the guests had very serious concerns about what an Obama victory could mean and raised a number of strategic dilemmas for the next four years and beyond. Most of this echoed the general sentiment expressed in recent years by the Occupy movement, unions and a number of other groups – “Do we pressurize the democrats? Do we abandon them? Do we offer support to specific candidates? Do we try and create groups to spread our own politics?” You get the idea. There isn’t anything like a clear path to even affecting the national political system in any way. The consequences are shrouded by endless unknowns. There was one message that echoed throughout: If Obama’s victory was to be celebrated, it was to be celebrated with reservations and with no illusions. The real battle was to start immediately.

Despite these serious doubts from large parts of the American left, the ‘lefties’ I speak of have rushed to celebrate Obama’s victory. It’s a monumental victory for the world, a sign of hope, a sign you can’t alienate minorities and so on. The same old tired clichés devoid of any political meaning rehearsed over and over again. None of them have raised any of the doubts about Obama’s policies or how they are put into practice both domestically and externally. The many contradictions that exist between what Obama says and represents and what his policitics actually entails can be found elsewhere. But what’s more worrying is that a number of British ‘lefties’ went out to the United States to campaign for Obama. They were out on the streets, in the headquarters and recited the messages of the campaign over online platforms over and over again.

This juxtaposition between the concerns of American leftists and the unequivocal support of Obama from British ‘lefties’ isn’t just a kind of degeneracy, it’s a major ethical problem which arises from a politics which never assesses the consequences of its actions on the world. The retort has amounted to “I’m a progressive and so is Obama! Do you want the right to win?”, “I’m pro-choice and so is Obama!” or simply “You’re helping Romney!” It is enough to admire a politician (If you’re into that sort of thing…) but to go to another and country and campaign for him when you’ve not considered the conditions there? Or to cheer-lead the victory from home? And to do so when so many people face serious strategic dilemmas and are unsure of how to respond to the struggles they are inevitably going to face? It’s not enough to cite Romney. This kind of action and dialogue is utterly perverse.

There are few conclusions to be drawn here. Firstly, beware of so called allies who draw their politics primary form a categorization or a label. Some of the most vile arguments in recent months have been presented under a ‘progressive’ label or the retort is to express a false sense of unity based on the label alone – “We’re all progressives! Let’s stop arguing!” when outright bigotry is expressed by an author. A political ally is made apparent through his or her expressions; the dialogue they use, the acts they commit and not the label they use. Secondly, a solidarity must be based on being truly reflective of the criticism of others. This is especially true when one is in a role of representation and to some degree claims to speak for others. An individual may very well stick to their argument or find that their actions are ethical and effective but the response has all too often been to refer to criticism as a “mob”, “illiberal” or “sectarian” rather than undergoing any process of reflection. Again, these are all attempts to obscure the mechanisms at work. It’s the use of power to present criticism as something it isn’t. Finally, the apparent conclusion to all this is that an ethical position is not simply embracing all that is labelled ‘progressive’ but a consistent examination of our political expression; both the dialogue we use and the acts we commit in relation to the material world and others.

Any leftist movement must begin with the world and not the petty-ethics of the self. The acts of some so-called allies demonstrate something more vulgar. I no longer think it’s enough to simply outline these problems to our so-called allies. I no longer believe that the ‘lefty’ has any roots in socialism. In current conditions, the need to both reject and oppose this stance is all too apparent.

These posts are common, but one in particular, which has started to gain traction on Tumblr, has caught my eye, and I wish to draw attention to how it embodies the dominant discourses around voting within the Democratic Party and the American left, discourses which seriously limit our ability to seriously affect political change. Parts of this particular post, such as the nostalgia, and the appeals to seniority, will be familiar, but others less so. And 2 elements of the post in particular: its narrative of Al Gore’s defeat in 2000 and its narrative of voter power and voter responsibility, are particularly insidious.

BUSH-NADER VS. GORE

“I know y’all LOVE the 90’s. Me too. And I remember after eight years of Clinton/Gore, I thought those motherfuckers were the devil. I was soooooooooooo upset with Bill Clinton waving his deregulation wand and his fucked foreign policy that I was all FUCK THE DEMOCRATS and I strongly advocated for Ralph Nader”

While the post opens with at least an attempt to acknowledge the failures of Clinton-Gore (in particular: deregulation and foreign policy), and documents how these failures drove her to work for third party candidate Ralph Nader (who, at the time, was polling as high as 8% nationally), these problems are almost immediately minimized, as she then states the reality of the Bush administration:

“[Bush] almost had us all living outside and eating dog food.”

This reality has her wishing she could re-do it, and framing her desire to abandon the Democrats and vote Nader in 2000 as selfish and lacking in foresight. What are the problems of the Clinton’s Third Way when compared with those of the Bush administration?

At this point is necessary to recount the reality of George Bush’s victory: one that happened by a margin of less than 1,000 votes, in 1 state, as a result of a Supreme Court decision. Nationally, Gore won the popular vote by over half a million votes. Also, in the run-up to the election, Republicans acted to purge voter rolls in Florida’s Democratic-leaning areas, and certain precincts also made use of the infamous and confusing Butterfly Ballot. It has been demonstrated that in the run up to November, 54,000 Floridians were purged from the state’s voting rolls, having been identified as felons, for reasons as simple as having a name similar to a convicted felon, and most of these voters (and again, the number of purged voters vastly exceeded Bush’s margin of victory in Florida) should have in fact been eligible to vote^[1]. In one heavily Democratic precinct in particular, Palm Beach County, the Reform Party’s Pat Buchanan received a vote share that was nearly triple his state-wide share, a total that vastly exceeded the total predicted by analysts in the run-up. Buchanan himself commented it was unlikely, having looked at the ballot design, that those votes were meant for him^[2]. An analysis of individual ballots also showed that a large number of voters had “overvoted”, or voted for 2 candidates on the same ballot, because of the butterfly ballot’s confusing design.

But even after these irregularities, the behaviour of the Supreme Court itself during the recount case is problematic. The motion for a state-wide recount was essentially defeated along a party line vote, with 5 Republican justices moving to affirm Bush’s victory without a recount. Bruce Ackerman, writing in the aftermath, characterized it as a constitutional coup^[3], and Bush’s inauguration was heavily picketed by those who recognized what had taken place.

Despite the overwhelming evidence of wrongdoing, however, the Democratic Party did not seriously pursue action against the result. While several African-American representatives offered motions against Bush’s election on grounds of disenfranchisement, they couldn’t find a single Democratic senator to endorse their motions, and thus they were dismissed^[4]. Rather than pursue the narrative of Republican fraudulence, the Democrats turned their attention to third-party candidate Ralph Nader, offering up a narrative that blamed his campaign and its voters for Gore’s defeat, and thus, the realities of the Bush administration.

RESPONSIBILIZATION, AND THE LESSER EVIL

As off-base as the popular perception of Nader’s role in 2000 is, one must understand why the Democratic Party propagates it, and how it effects political discourse in the United States. By framing Gore’s defeat as a matter of cumulative individual actions, rather than as a matter of systemic disenfranchisement, it allows for a re-framing of the Democratic Party in the relation to the Republicans. The Democrats may undertake actions that the liberal voter finds repulsive, but it is necessary to take the bad with the good in order to prevent the coming reactionary power. On this point the author becomes particularly aggressive:

“If you think voting for Obama is the lesser of two evils, you’re wrong, it’s the lesser of three because not voting IS voting for Romney. Not voting is voting for dickbag judges that sentence people to jail in counties that have privatized prisons for minor drug infractions. Not voting is voting to remove pensions and collective bargaining and the last shreds of union power from the people. Not voting this election is voting for Feudalism.”

To understand just how this narrative functions, I think we must turn to the concept of responsibilization. Responsibilization, a term that originated in studies of governmentality, refers to the process whereby a body such as a state or political party disavows responsibility for something, and transfers it into the individual. During the Reagan administration, this process was presented as giving the individual exciting new opportunities in a liberated market, free from government interference, but in the hands of the modern Democratic Party, it becomes a tool used to extract submission at the voting booth.

This discourse is not only visible in histories of the 2000 election, but is visible today as part of the Obama campaign’s rhetoric. On one hand, the Democrats will insist that the liberal voter vote straight ticket, because to do otherwise will be to abandon minority groups, women, queers, immigrants, to the coming Republican terror, while pursuing a right-wing program while in government, reforming welfare, proposing cuts to Medicare and social security, and pursuing a murderous foreign policy. In reality, Democrats will offer token support for these groups they represent, but this often amounts to little more than a holding pattern against right-wing attacks, and with unions in particular, the Democrats themselves will actively attack and marginalize the very groups they supposedly represent (witness Rahm Emanuel’s recent behaviour in Chicago, and the actions of the Democratic Party in Arkansas).

It is the discourse of responsibility that allows them to do this, even though their opposition to the Republicans is often pitiful, and not just in terms of legislation. As the Republicans begin to propagate a narrative of endemic voter fraud (necessarily solved by massively disenfranchising marginalized groups), the Democrats fail to offer a convincing counter-narrative, and slowly we begin to see voters move right, and accept this narrative, and resolve that action must be taken. This is also evident in Republican narratives of drug use among welfare recipients. The discourse of responsibility allows the Democratic Party to take the votes of these groups harmed by these narratives for granted, and move themselves to the right on countless issues (as many have pointed out, Obama’s administration is to the right of Reagan’s on several points).

Within the Democratic Party, the discourse of responsibility is incredibly difficult to counter. But countering is possible; we can see the beginnings of an attempt at a new discourse within the Republican Party. Consider, for example, the significant number of primary challenges to established Republicans in 2010. While not all of these were successful, their presence and effectiveness signaled a sea change within the Republican Party, which moves itself to the right as it can no longer take for granted that its partisans will vote merely to prevent a Democratic government.

The Democratic Party has had opportunities in the past to do the same, such as the 1994 and 2010 mid-term defeats, but these rejections of the centrist lesser evil never turn into anything like an effective movement against the rightward-shifting Democratic leadership. Instead, the party reasserts itself; rather than taking the defeats as signs of a need to consider the interests of its left-wing contingent, it re-asserts the narrative of the lesser evil, and demands the left-wing contingent suppress its own desires to prevent the Republicans asserting theirs.

CONCLUSION

“Yes, I prefer Obama over Romney, Democrats over Republicans — but is that really where the discussion has to end? This is the dark side of reasoned argument, where debate itself becomes a form of violence.” – Adam Kotsko^[5]

How can we begin to think beyond the discourses of responsibility the Democratic Party currently uses, and begin to assert our own interests effectively in the political sphere? First we must realize that it won’t do to merely turn the discourse of responsibility inward, to say that it is the voter’s responsibility to vote for a third-party candidate and so on. Instead, we must realize that the limits on our possible political actions are always placed upon us by the discourses we inhabit. And so we can perhaps construct a politics that is centered on the propagation of our own ideals, rather a politics centered upon defeating a political force that is only slightly to the right of the one that claims to represent us. If this can be successfully done, the question of whether or not our party effectively aligns with our interests becomes less important, as we begin to reconstruct discourse in a way that means their only viable positions are ones that we have dictated in advance. This has been effectively done in the past, for example look at the Republican Party campaigning on their support of organized labor in the 1950′s, or Richard Nixon’s moves to institute a guaranteed minimum income and universal healthcare in the 1970′s. It is entirely within our power to begin moving political discourse to the left, and to begin defending the vision of a better world, but this is only possible if we begin to reject the responsibilities to the Democratic Party that they’ve placed upon us.

In existentialism the Absurd is a simple concept; the meaningless or amorality of the universe, and the attempt of a human agent to assign this meaning, leading to a state of Absurdism. Kierkegaard assigned this meaning⁽¹⁾ through the use of religion or a deific entity that existed beyond the Absurd and thus gave a non-Absurd reality that, while beyond the reach of humans, allowed for meaning to be ascribed and existential tension to be released and moved beyond. Camus rejected this. In The Myth of Sisyphus he declared such a position as “philosophical suicide”⁽²⁾ and then used the example of Sisyphus as an Absurd hero:

“In the last chapter, Camus outlines the legend of Sisyphus who defied the gods and put Death in chains so that no human needed to die. When Death was eventually liberated and it came time for Sisyphus himself to die, he concocted a deceit which let him escape from the underworld. Finally captured, the gods decided on his punishment: for all eternity, he would have to push a rock up a mountain; upon reaching the top, the rock would roll down again leaving Sisyphus to start over. Camus sees Sisyphus as the absurd hero who lives life to the fullest, hates death and is condemned to a meaningless task.”⁽³⁾

Camus asserts that the fate of the worker is confined to a similar Absurdity, “The workman of today works every day in his life at the same tasks, and this fate is no less absurd. But it is tragic only at the rare moments when it becomes conscious.”⁽⁴⁾

This tragedy, the worker becoming conscious of the Absurdity of their situation, may sound familiar to those of you who have experienced, or know those with depression. For those of you who are leftists, the fact that Capitalism can cause such despair may seem second nature. And it should be. This rare moment of tragic realisation can fast become a daily struggle, and can describe the resistance to treatment of some depressed patients. The feeling of hopelessness and lack of agency can be described through Marx’s concept of alienation. The worthlessness can be ascribed through the idea of socially necessary labour time; this creates an abstract of the worker’s labour and requires the treatment of the worker as a cog in the vast machine of Capital, existing only to create exchange value. In this way we can see how many Marxist concepts can be used to derive the possible causes of depressed symptoms.

The Tragic:

As we can see there are clear parallels to be drawn between ways in which Capital sustains itself and how they can affect the mood of those it subsumes. While not applicable for every depressed patient, I believe that there is a link between the cruelty and alienating nature of Capitalism and the ever increasing rates of diagnosis for depression.

This is no new concept, Mark Fisher’s “Capitalist Realism” tackles this subject:

“I want to argue that it is necessary to reframe the growing problem of stress (and distress) in capitalist societies. Instead of treating it as incumbent on individuals to resolve their own psychological distress, instead, that is, of accepting the vast privatization of stress that has taken place over the last thirty years, we need to ask: how has it become acceptable that so many people, and especially so many young people, are ill? The ‘mental health plague’ in capitalist societies would suggest that, instead of being the only social system that works, capitalism is inherently dysfunctional, and that the cost of it appearing to work is very high.”⁽⁵⁾

As Fisher points out, a huge part of Capital is the removal of community and of social responsibility. The problems of the individual are solely the individual’s problems, self created and self aggravating. We currently have a system where the alienation of the worker is part and parcel with the requirement for each individual to be a completely independent entity, despite the need of Capital for the worker to open their skill pool to generification and become a flexible, faceless tool for the use of accumulating value. In the face of such a stark contradiction we can see how untenable this position becomes.

Worldwide depression, along with co-morbid or related illness, has quickly spread to near epidemic levels; according to WHO and other health organisations, depression affects up to 350 million people.⁽⁶⁾ 60% of the 850,000 people per year⁽⁷⁾ who take their own lives suffer from depression or another mood disorder. Taking a closer look, the rate of diagnosis on depression is higher in more affluent, richer countries. This contrasts heavily with what is usually expected from health care systems in more economically developed countries, where the resources exist to provide comprehensive and effective treatment, as well as more sophisticated prevention methods.⁽⁸⁾ Although the money and infrastructure exists in more developed nations this disparity continues to pervade. While the richest countries routinely have higher survival and treatment rates for every other illness, depression remains an outlier.

Depression as an illness is typified by many symptoms; most obviously the low moods. There are also secondary characteristics which draw from these low moods and help sustain them and are some of the biggest obstacles to the depressive patient in overcoming it.⁽⁹⁾ Self guilt is one; the belief that everything bad that happens to or around you is your fault, creating an incredible amount of hate directed at the self. The clear analogue to self guilt in our society is in the way that it regards the individual agent as a purely rational being who has to bear the weight of anything that happens to them as solely their responsibility.

However, this emphasis on individualism is a losing prospect. Our Capitalist society denies this individualism in its very nature, even as it exults it. The worker is stuck inside an incoherent and powerful system, with false freedoms afforded to help placate and coerce them; the choices at national election which are only vague differences between near-identical ideology, the idea of being a free agent in a labour market which favours the employer and demands submission and, of course, the overt use of consumerism to promote choice and individuality within the confines of identikit products and conspicuous consumption. When the Absurd becomes realised in the depressed mind, this leads to a form of learned helplessness. Acutely aware of their position within the world, alienated from work and answerable to arbitrary, obtuse hierarchies, the only available rejection of this subservience is to shut down. The cognitive dissonance arising from the realisation that “life is what you make of it” is false, coupled with treatment that tries to push the supposed truth of this mantra further as the reason for your depression, is debilitating. This constant reaffirming that control is out of your hands, the requirement to give up power to those above you, leads to the avoidance of stress that is common in depression. Those who shut themselves into their rooms and houses and don’t answer the phone for fear of what is on the other end, have learnt this behaviour through the Capitalist system, a system that privatised our stress and then removed our agency.

From my personal experience and that of others I have talked to, medicine seems holds dear the notion of biological factors or chemical imbalances being key within the diagnosis of the causes of a depressive episode. This can also be supported by data in antidepressant prescription rates^(10)(11) and in the use of antidepressants as a first line treatment in depression.⁽¹²⁾ Second to this comes the obvious despair that can regularly accompany traumatic events, such as the death of a loved one or identifiable causes such as postpartum depression. However these “triggered” episodes are generally short lived. While these episodes can lead to a longer period of depression they are treated as a separate branch, and aren’t indicative of the patient independently developing major depressive disorder as we are discussing here.⁽¹³⁾ Of course, that is not to say this is impossible, I don’t wish to downplay anyones mental health, but even in those cases the cause is clear and the continuation can often be explained through the aforementioned chemical/biological causes. However, there is a clear segment of those who suffer with chronic or recurring depression where neither of these explanations are sufficient. Those who are regularly forced through session after session of cognitive behavioural therapy and drug regimes soon find the fog descends anew, if the treatment has any effect in the first place.⁽¹⁴⁾ Studies put the efficacy of combined CBT and drug treatments, the current course de rigueur favoured by the medical establishment, at anywhere from 47%⁽¹⁵⁾ to 62%⁽¹⁶⁾ or even 85%⁽¹⁷⁾. What is clear is that there are a significant number of patients for whom treatment is ineffective or at best simply “dulls” the symptoms. That this number is so large is an obvious cause for concern and research, yet if you walk into your doctor’s practice today and are diagnosed as depressed, I can guarantee that you will be given a treatment plan of CBT and antidepressant medication. Perhaps you will be transferred to counselling first but, if your symptoms persist, you will eventually be thrust on the path of endless CBT and medication, even in the face of major and recurring symptoms.

Self loathing is another common symptom within depression, along with hopelessness and worthlessness. In this case they arise through the same mechanics as self guilt, and are inexorably tied to this guilt. It is also a result of the inherent inhuman nature of Capital. These factors together leave only the self as the target of hate. Even when the true reason for the depressed mood is realised the system of Capital is decentralised, each component as implicit in oppression as the other, with no clear target for the malaise felt. The hate is internalised, the hopelessness and worthlessness develop through this hate, and create a legitimate lack of hope for a change in situation. When the worries are as far reaching and as existential as they become in cases of those aware of their predicament, the standard therapies and pills become little more than a band aid at best, a further cause of frustration and worry at worst.

(1) Kirkegaard S., “The Sickness Unto Death”, transl. Hong H., Hong E. Princeton University Press (1980), p. 22-28 NB: Most of this book is relevant, not just the section cited here.
(2)Camus A., “The Myth Of Sisyphus: And Other Essays”, transl. O’Brien J. Vintage (1991), p. 28
(3)http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Myth_of_Sisyphus#Chapter_4:_The_Myth_of_Sisyphus
(4)Camus A., “The Myth Of Sisyphus: And Other Essays”, transl. O’Brien J. Vintage (1991), p. 121
(5)Fisher M., “Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?” O Books (2009) p. 19
(6)http://www.who.int/mental_health/management/depression/who_paper_depression_wfmh_2012.pdf
(7)http://www.befrienders.org/info/index.asp?PageURL=statistics.php
(8)http://www.who.int/whr/2000/en/whr00_en.pdf p. 152-187 & 200-203
(9)Wenzlaff R., Wegner M., Pennebaker J., “The mental control of depression: Psychological obstacles to emotional well-being.”, Handbook of mental control, 1993 p. 239-257
(10)Ilyas S., Moncrieff J., “Trends in prescriptions and costs of drugs for mental disorders in England, 1998 –2010” B J Psych, 2012, Vol 200, No 5, p. 393-398
(11)http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/databriefs/db76.htm
(12)http://032912b.membershipsoftware.org/libdocuments/Treatment_Resistant_Depression.pdf
(13)http://www.psychiatrictimes.com/sleep-bruxism/content/article/10168/1166991
(14)http://032912b.membershipsoftware.org/libdocuments/Treatment_Resistant_Depression.pdf
(15)http://psychcentral.com/lib/2008/depression-treatment-psychotherapy-medication-or-both/
(16)de Jonghe F., Kool S., van Aalst G., Dekker J., Peen J., “Combining psychotherapy and antidepressants in the treatment of depression“, Journal of Affective Disorders, May 2001, Vol 64(2-3), p. 217-229
(17)http://www.aafp.org/afp/2006/0101/p83.html

When we buy fresh and organic, it brings together ideas of authenticity and naturalness to the produce that we are purchasing. Yet these products are distributed and the profits reaped by the same system that is responsible for providing the factory-farmed, the pesticide sprayed, the mechanically reconstituted that fresh food is marketed as being in opposition to. It is a fetishistic nostalgia that is shown in images of hands clasping soil and root and logos brimming with intensive distributions of earthy green colours.

The UK Fresh Produce Consortium, who promote and support the “5 a day” and “Healthy Start” campaigns, protects the interests of its members such as Morrisons, Asda, Tesco, and Sainsbury’s as well as smaller and independent retailers. That you are expected eat 5 a day and fish every week, that seemingly intrinsic expectation of what makes you healthy, is produced by the very same retailers that shovel you with crap.

If I want to buy a happy chicken raised in an open field on corn, then I pay over £6 in comparison to the £3.70 or so that it costs for that chicken’s sad, factory-farmed cousin. To buy a chicken costs a full hour of work at minimum wage. With the cost of rent and bills rising as well as food, our society still deems it fit to tell them that this is not enough. You must pay more to be more moral. It is a two-fold problem. It’s healthy for being organic and healthy yet again for being one of your five a day. A price to be paid twice over for peace of mind on an expectation that was pushed by the retailers in the first place.

Fairtrade certification, which is awarded for adhering to the  Fairtrade standards,  is another example of this rhetoric. It is intrinsically set up against other forms of trade, which are implicitly deemed Unfair trade. Therefore, there’s an implicit morality weighted into its cost over similar “unfair” goods. Tesco Fairtrade coffee is £2.99 and it’s Unfair trade alternative is £2.09. We can assume then that the price of a moral person is approximately 90p. Instead of asking us to question the premise of trade at all, it simply quantifies itself as purity and morality. After all, who would be monstrous enough as to be against fairness?

The rhetoric of this consumer ethics sets up our world as a choice between immoral cheapness and bad technology or moral expense and good naturalness. It is the difference between grey clouds, rust, machinistic chaos and blue sky suns, cows in fields, leathered farmers. Of course, it doesn’t account for the fact that the distribution and profit of both choices goes to the same organisations. It sanctifies the perverse notion that morality requires sacrifice, turning the inward asceticism of the monk into a productive market force.

It should not surprise us that Fair trade, this inversion of asceticism, was born from religious initiatives like the Mennonite Central Committee. The monk gave up his life of plenty. His spirituality was a place where consumption was minimised so that God could be emphasised. In place of luxury he lived a plain life. In contrast, the spirituality of Fair trade is not an injunction to consume less. It is an injunction to consume more, spend more, grow more but in a different way. It would not make economic sense for retailers to support a movement that would encourage its customers to consume less – that would hurt the bottom line.

Instead of risking the bottom line by limiting consumption,  the retailers suggest that if you buy more Fair trade then more Fairness will be spread around the world through the generosity of your spending. The more Fair trade you buy then the fairer the world becomes. You can preach to the crowd with your wallet and are spiritually rewarded in that way. The monk chooses piety, the shopper chooses luxury, and in their own way they achieve salvation. Yet when that choice is buy organic or pay bills, as is the case for growing numbers of people, it doesn’t seem to be much of a choice at all.

The consumer ethics of value vs organic serves to reinforce the predominant view of the poor in our society. Our society is not content to castigate the poor for making bad choices – for being venal, lazy and immoral – it must enforce it. This is a mechanism that specifically excludes those without the means from pursuing what society deems to be ethical. Fortunately for us, the market is beginning to take heed of the growing number of middle class people in perilous circumstances by rebranding the red and blue functionality of Tesco Value with the pleasing, earthy pastel colours of Everyday Value. Now value does not look so different from organic anymore.

Workplace democracy and society

In the context of the latter, Pateman and Blumberg have been identified as “the best known contemporary articulators of the values and purposes of workplace democracy” (Skelley, 1989: 177). Pateman (1970) has interpreted the political philosophies of Rousseau, Mill and Cole to contribute to a theory of participatory democracy which is justified through “the human results that accrue from the participatory process” (Pateman, 1970: 43) and “built around the central assertion that individuals and their institutions cannot be considered in isolation from one another” (Pateman, 1970: 42). Pateman asserts that a governmental democracy based on participation must be based on a “participatory society” in which all institutions utilize a participatory decision making process. Without this, citizens would not be educated in the ways of participation, resulting in them having no will to participate in government, failing to develop a sense of political efficacy, lacking a sense of dignity, worth and freedom and they will be less willing to accept societal decisions (Skelley, 1989, Pateman, 1970). Pateman argues that the workplace is “the most important area” in which such education can take place because “most individuals spend a great deal of their lifetime at work and the business of the workplace provides an education in the management of collective affairs that is difficult to parallel elsewhere” (Pateman, 1970: 43) and because participation in democracy in the workplace allows for “considerable control over their lives and environments” (Skelley, 1989: 178).

Blumberg (1968) was discussed to some extent in my previous article concerning alienation and infantilization, in which he identifies alienation at work as the common condition of modern man. Blumberg further contends that participation in decision making increases the employee’s power in the working environment, which in turn increases the status of the employee both in his own eyes and in the context of the organization which in turn leads to improvements in morale and productivity. Blumberg illustrates this with the model presented in figure 1.

Figure 1: Blumberg’s model of participation in decision making

Workplace democracy and Organizational Development

Skelley (1989) summarizes Pateman and Blumberg’s assumptions and values and compares them with the assumptions and values of the academic field of organizational development, as adapted from French and Bell (1979), finding many similarities and broadly concluding them to be compatible and complementary. The assumptions and values of workplace democracy as per Skelley’s interpretation of Pateman and Blumberg as well as the assumptions and values of organizational development as per Skelley’s adaption of French and Bell are included at the bottom of this article.

Skelley (1989) also notes a number of differences between the field of organizational development (OD) and workplace democracy as advocated by Pateman and Blumberg. Firstly, workplace democracy has broader goals of societal change, whereas OD is a tool for managing change based on the needs of organizations and the psychological well-being of individuals in those organizations. Note how this is not indicative of the views of all advocates for workplace democracy. While some, such as Pateman, Blumberg and Chomsky, advocate workplace democracy with these aims, it is not universal and not part of the definition of workplace democracy given in my first article nor a part or motivation of many of the contemporary firms operating as workplace democracies, which we shall examine in later articles. The discrepancy appears to be caused by whether the analysis performed focuses on business or society as a starting or focal point. However, these two types of advocates for workplace democracy are not mutually exclusive. Secondly, as we shall also discuss more in depth in a later article, Pateman and Blumberg overly rely on the perceived benefits of participation to solve problems, while OD offers a number of more specific tools to solve potential organizational problems.

Skelley then draws from organizational development literature demonstrating that certain organizational and individual factors can affect positively or negatively the inclination towards participation (Golembiewski, 1982; Stewart & Garson, 1983). This results in a draft for a revised model of the participative experience shown in figure 2.

Figure 2: Skelley’s revision of Blumberg’s model of participation in decision making

Human work needs

Katz and Kahn (1966) identify three basic human work needs based on a review of organizational research:

(1)    Autonomy or control over one’s own behavior

(2)    Completion or achievement of a whole, finished task

(3)    Interpersonal contact in the context of work activities

We can see right away how these human work needs tie into the concepts of infantilization and alienation. The first work need stands directly opposed to the infantilization so pervasive in traditional workplaces as discussed in the previous article. Frustration of the second and third human work needs each contribute to different aspects of alienation. Marx (1932) identified four ways in which the worker is alienated:

(1)    From the product of his/her labour

(2)    From the  act of producing

(3)    From his/her species-essence

(4)    From other workers

Frustration of the second work need contributes primarily to the second type of alienation, whereas frustration of the third work need contributes primarily to the fourth.

Sashkin (1984) finds that these three basic human work needs are supported by a range of psychological and sociological research findings and then goes on to develop the model shown in figure 3 to demonstrate that “participative management has positive effects on performance, productivity, and employee satisfaction because it fulfills the three basic human work needs: increased autonomy, increased meaningfulness, and decreased isolation” (Sashkin, 1984: 11).

Figure 3: Sashkin’s model of participative management

Sashkin identifies four broad areas of participation, which he notes are “neither “pure” nor mutually exclusive” (Sashkin, 1984:5), through which workers can experience autonomy and the completion of meaningful tasks, two of the three work needs, while the act of participation itself necessarily satisfies the third work need of interpersonal contact. This in turn is hypothesized to lead to a number of beneficial feelings which lead to increased innovation and ultimately performance and productivity.

Skelley’s and Sashkin’s models are broadly compatible. Sashkin’s model acknowledges Skelley’s point about “Predisposition to Participate” with the “Individual/Organizational Contingency Factors”, but does again start from the point of participation, similar to Blumberg’s original model. Both Sashkin’s and Skelley’s models recognize how participation leads to empowerment/autonomy which in turn leads to satisfaction or acceptance. Sashkin, based on the three basic human work needs, does not have satisfaction flow directly from autonomy but rather from the separate need of completing meaningful tasks which in turn is fulfilled through participation. Based on this same model of human work needs, this satisfaction and acceptance in turn leads to performance and productivity, whereas Skelley sees both as stemming from empowerment. Sashkin’s model could be improved by implementing Skelley’s point that participation can be stimulated or hindered by other individual and organizational factors to such an extent that these factors, and not participation, should be the starting point of the model. Since participation in turn has an effect on these factors, this turns the first part of the model into a feedback loop, as shown in figure 4.

Figure 4: Revised model of participative management

In the next article, we will begin to examine a number of potential advantages of workplace democracy, followed by examining a number of potential disadvantages. After this, we shall take a look at the history of workplace democracy, discuss the relation between cooperatives and workplace democracy after which we will move on and examine a number of currently operating democratic workplaces.

Assumptions and values of workplace democracy as per Skelley’s interpretation of Pateman and Blumberg

1.  Concerning people as individuals:

1. Alienation is the common condition of man at work.
2. Direct participation can mitigate alienation.
3. Participation is learned by participating in social institutions
4. People who are not socialized into participation lack dignity, self-worth, a sense of freedom, and an acceptance of societal conditions
5. Participation increases worker power which increases worker status, and thereby improves worker morale and productivity.
6. Participation leads to satisfaction by gratifying basic human needs.
7. Most people want to participate in organizational decision making.

2. Concerning leaders and people in groups:

1. The workplace provides the greatest opportunity for participation in collective action and gaining experience in participative decision making.
2. Full participation requires ending the distinction between managers and employees.

3.  Concerning people in organizations:

1. Individuals and institutions cannot be considered separately.
2. Democratic government requires a participative society.
3. Sharing workplace control extends the workers’ control over his life and environment while increasing involvement, commitment, and satisfaction.
4. Autocratic organizations tend to undermine the employee’s psychological maturity, whereas democratic ones strengthen maturity by stimulating its traits.
5. Economic equality at work is necessary if full participation is to be achieved.

4. Concerning workplace democracy value and belief systems:

1. The participatory process produces human results.
2. Management of industries is a form of political system.
3. The workplace can be democratized; if it cannot, then the theory of participative democracy must be revised.
4. Economic equality is essential to complete attainment of workplace democracy

Assumptions and values of organizational development as per Skelley’s adaption of French and Bell

1.  Concerning people as individuals:

1. Given support and challenge, most people will live up to their capabilities.
2. Most people can and are willing to make greater contributions than their organizations permit.

2. Concerning leaders and people in groups:

1. An individual’s satisfaction and competence depend highly on the climate of his work group.
2. Individuals seek acceptance and interaction in small reference groups.
3. Group members must assist leaders with leadership and maintenance functions.
4. Suppressing feelings adversely affects problem solving, personal growth, and job satisfaction.
5. Trust, support, and cooperation among group members are usually lower than necessary.
6. Transactional solutions can succeed with attitudinal and motivational problems.

3. Concerning people in organizations:

1. The dynamics between linked work groups have a powerful effect on the attitudes and behavior of members in these groups.
2. Usually win-lose conflict strategies are not conducive to solving problems in the long run.
3. Resolving difficulties within organizations requires time and patience.
4. Changes in human dynamics require changes in personnel appraisal, compensation, training, staffing, tasks, and communications.

4. Concerning clients:

1. Organizational members usually share goal commitments, a desire to collaborate, and win-win approaches to conflict
2. Organizational members, especially the powerful, usually value all members’ welfare.

5. Concerning organizational development value and belief systems:

1. Because organizations exist to meet members’ needs, a primary concern in creating conditions in which needs can be satisfied.
2. Life and work are more meaningful and satisfying when feelings and sentiments can be expressed.
3. Change agents should be committed to broadly conceived action and research.
4. Humanized work and democratic-participative management maximize human resources and empowers organizational members.

Sources

Blumberg, P. (1968). Industrial Democracy. Schocken Books, New York.

French, W.L. & Bell, C.H. (1978). Organizational development: Behavioral Science Interventions for Organizational Improvement, 2^nd ed. Prentice Hall, Englewood Cliffs.

Golembiewski, R. (1982). Toward Democracy within and through Administration: A Primer to Inspire and Guide OD Applications. In Uveges, J. (Eds.) Public Administration: History and Theory in Contemporary Perspective. Marcel Dekker, New York.

Pateman, C. (1970). Participation and Democratic Theory. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.

Katz, D. & Kahn, R. (1966). The Social Psychology of Organizations. John Wiley & Sons, New York.

Marx, K. (1932). Economic & Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844. Retrieved from http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1844/manuscripts/preface.htm

Sashkin, M. (1984). Participative Management Is an Ethical Imperative. Organizational Dynamics. Spring 12(4) pp. 4-22.

Skelley, B.D. (1989). Workplace Democracy and OD: Philosophical and Practical Connections. Public Administration Quarterly. 13, 2, pp. 176-195.

Stewart, D. & Garson, G. (1983). Organizational Behavior and Public Management. Marcel Dekker, New York.

Alistair Darling’s embarrassing wibble in the Guardian is a classic example of the latter – in which the man in charge of the ‘No’ campaign fails to come up with a single concrete argument in favour of the union. Chiefly, his stance revolves around the UN Security Council (irrelevant – Scotland isn’t represented, the UK is. Scotland has no real need for representation at that level, it requires representing within Europe, where it has zero influence) and World War Two (sentimental, nationalist pandering. We fought Nazis with Stalin too, but Darling probably isn’t in too much of a hurry to bring him back.) Deep down, even Darling must know that this sort of talk has no relevance to anybody living in Scotland today.

Otherwise, he focuses on the maybes, demanding to know what Scotland will do after independence. That’s got nothing to do with him – the whole point is that it’s for the Scottish people to decide. The scare stories, of Scotland losing jobs, having to reapply to the EU, being unable to bail out banks, have been proved to be nonsense. The simple economic argument in favour is this: Scotland pays all of its income to Westminster, and gets a lesser amount spent on it in return, and doesn’t get to have a say on where it’s spent. In return, it also has to chip in to ‘national’ projects which rarely have any benefit north of the border, such as the hugely expensive overhaul of London’s sewer system, and the London Olympics. To these arguments, Darling has nothing, because he knows that there’s no acceptable response – it’s naked exploitation. Read that article again – that’s honestly the best they’ve got.

The argument that Scotland would abandon the rest of the UK to decades of Tory dominance, however, is perhaps the worst of the lot – aside from the fundamental counter-arguments (“not our problem, son” and “how’s the Labour Party working out for you”), it ignores two things – firstly, that escaping the imposition of unwanted Tory rule is probably the single biggest factor driving the independence campaign, and secondly, as with almost all anti-independence arguments, the facts. Labour are not indebted to Scottish seats for any recent election successes – there are, however, a number of unpopular acts of legislation passed, such as prescription charges, which were dependent on votes from MP’s who wouldn’t dare support them in their own constituencies north of the border.

Indeed, there may be another benefit for England’s left-wing in Scottish independence. The contentious Trident programme would require an immediate rehousing, at the expense of the government in Westminster – unfortunately, the only base equipped for that in the UK is Coulport, in Scotland. Building another base could take as much as ten years, and non-proliferation treaties mean that the UK’s hands would be tied over the issue. Unless Scotland accepts an exorbitant fee to look after them – unlikely, since opposition to Trident is one of the most strongly-pushed issues by the SNP – then the system would almost certainly have to be scrapped.

In truth, the simple fact is that political process is impossible when Scotland has such limited control over its own policies. Despite the power the Scottish Parliament wields, smaller reforms cannot be implemented without the larger ones necessary to support them, and any major changes in Scottish policy are therefore restricted to the rejection of UK-wide reforms. Given Scotland’s track record on opposing neoliberal cuts that have ravaged England – university education is still free, as are prescriptions, council houses are being built on a large scale, without the ‘right to buy.’ Independence is not indivisible from the SNP, as most news reports would have you believe – if a yes vote is achieved, it is uncertain what will fill the resultant vacuum, but even with the apathy brought by Unionism, and a weakened parliament, the Scottish electorate has still managed to force a set of policies a lot further to the left of any of the big 3 English parties, which will only become more powerful after independence.

The basic blueprint offered by the SNP looks rather Scandinavian – a strong welfare state, public sector, and accessible public services, allied to a relatively business-friendly tax policy and financed through national resources such as oil (which Scotland is not entirely dependent on, and should last well over 100 years.) The fact that the Scots will get this at first doesn’t mean that it will be the blueprint for all future Scottish governments, but without that first step of independence, imagining anything else other than the present state of affairs is a pipedream.

Of course, all this is simple shooting-down of unionist myths, which has been done more comprehensively and effectively elsewhere, made easy by the fact that almost all negative coverage of Scottish independence is either some nobody’s ill-researched tuppence or fanciful, made-up nonsense as a reaction to the fact that the anti-independence campaign really doesn’t have any concrete arguments in its favour.

On the other side, the left in the UK can seem indifferent, for reasons which are largely nebulous. They warn of ‘the dangers of nationalism’, without any real idea of what it might represent. Nationalism differs from one country to the next, and often within each region. That’s virtually the whole point behind the idea. Any blanket denouncing of nationalism would require a set of blanket problems, criticisms, or at least circumstances which simply don’t exist. British nationalism can’t be compared to Scottish nationalism because the two are, obviously, mutually exclusive.

The independence question is one of nationality, but there is no non-nationalist option. The rejection of Scottish Nationalism is an endorsement of British Nationalism. It’s one or the other. So let’s compare and contrast – do you support the nationalism of the oppressed, in the interests of self-determination, or the nationalism of the oppressor, in the interests of imperialism? The nationalism backed by the most anti-military and open-borders ideology in mainstream UK politics, or the nationalism backed by parties that give nothing but hostility towards immigrants, waste billions on military equipment that isn’t even effective, and attempt to rehabilitate the likes of Enoch Powell? The nationalism that uses the phrase ‘New Scots’, or the nationalism that uses the phrase ‘Real Scots’(1)? The simple fact is that the nationalist campaign has barely pandered to romanticism or ideas of patriotism at all. The Unionist campaign has and will for the simple reason that it doesn’t have anything else to offer.

Even this, though, is a distraction. The real issue for the left is that the struggle for Scottish independence is inherently a class struggle. The foundation of the vast majority of nationalist ideas is, even with regard to self-determination, economic. What is being fought over is not taxes or personal income, but public money. The money that is siphoned out of Scotland that would under independence be spent on welfare and public services is not instead spent on the same in some corner of Berkshire. It’s sacrificed to neoliberal cuts, to trident, or whatever other scheme Westminster deems more important than people’s livelihoods.

The opposition to Scottish independence, particularly from Tories, regularly attacks Scotland’s high state spending, and routinely includes the claim that Scotland is ‘subsidised’ and will not be able to afford to maintain its high spending on welfare. This is entirely without foundation, and has at its root a casual, anti-Scottish bigotry, tied to a more general brand of classism.

As an aside, some history: the birth of the union between Scotland and England was itself an issue of class and identity. With Scottish lowland landowners investing heavily in the colonial Darien Scheme, and war between England and France looming, Westminster saw the perfect opportunity to secure its northern border, using military blockades to strangle the Scottish expedition before bullying, bribing, and isolating enough Scottish politicians into signing away their sovereignty. The partition of Czechoslovakia and the Anschluss of Austria would be good comparisons, but even they enjoyed a higher level of support than the 99 to 1 against(2) reported by Daniel Defoe, a English spy in Edinburgh at the time.

England’s entire history of imperialism in the British Isles has long been fuelled by a sort of united bigotry, encompassing class, race, nationality, and later, religion. Many of the higher-class lowland Scots England signed its pact with were viewed as Anglicisable, but others were not – Highland Scots suffered a level of brutal exploitation and bigotry easily comparable to the views that were held towards the Irish and, to a lesser extent, the Welsh. That was as much a class issue as a racial one, and after industrialisation, right up to today, the same streak has carried over into Scotland’s urban poor – Glasgow shipbuilders notoriously (and very noisily) suffered repeated exploitation at the hands of the UK government, and the ‘too poor, too weak, too stupid’ rhetoric used to oppose independence today is another shade of the casually-bigoted ‘deep-fried heroin’ jokes. Scottish identity since the Union has always been about class.

Regardless, if you still adhere to the message that the left-liberal consensus south of the border has to offer – “I hope you’re not rejecting those brutally destructive neoliberal reforms in a nationalist way!” – then fair enough. It’s not about you anyway – you barely get to have an opinion. But a proportion of wealth and the livelihoods of working people far greater than the Miner’s strike, or any other within living memory is at stake. It represents by far the biggest opposition to cuts and austerity in the UK at the moment, as well as the opportunity to reject it completely. It may differ from industrial action in that some Saltires might be waved about, but that doesn’t mean your indifference makes you any less of a scab.

(1) See this rather embarrassing tweet from the ‘Better Together’ campaign claiming ‘abuse’ for a perfect example of how the catchphrase is being used.

(2) The Letters of Daniel Defoe (edited by G. H. Healey, Oxford 1955)

One doesn’t have to look far too see our failures. Ever since the establishment of what may be referred to as the post-war settlement, the social democratic proposition has been eroded. The problems we face in the twenty-first century don’t need repeating, you can see them everywhere and are recited by the same authors over and over. I can not help but feel that while we all recognise the trajectory we are on, we tie ourselves to actions which are doomed to failure. Do we have the power to find a new future? If so, how do we even begin to face such problems?

“What one should always bear in mind is that any debate here and now necessarily remains a debate on enemy’s turf; time is needed to deploy the new content. All we say now can be taken from us – everything except our silence. This silence, this rejection of dialogue, of all forms of clinching, is our “terror”, ominous and threatening as it should be.”

Slavoj Žižek

And yet, rather than confronting the condition we find ourselves in, groups continue to emerge claiming to offer a path to social justice. They turn opposition into ‘activism’ – a narrowly defined set of actions which opens dialogue with the established political system. Ignoring the question of our own agency in the world, they believe that our words and actions can radically change the world, providing they are tied to a set of ideals which the left should apparently uphold.

All this presumes that we live in a world of choices. We delude ourselves by pretending that we have the choice between austerity and welfare. By asking what sort of society we wish to live in we, we act as if our words can accurately reflect such a proposal with certainty – never mind the lunacy in believing we simply build a future from turning our ideas and dreams into some form of reality.

Of course, neoliberalism easily subsumes such acts. It devours opposition, eventually presenting it as part of the capitalist system. Most recently, is this not the case with Occupy London and UKUncut? Political actions which began as somewhat spontaneous and antagonistic were soon adopted by the political establishment. Politicians moved to adopt the language of ‘Responsible capitalism’ and the Tories began to talk of the immorality of tax avoidance. The same has been repeated for decades regardless of the source of ‘opposition’. Opposition is easily brought in to serve as part of an always deforming neoliberal governance model. Regardless of how the capitalist machine deviates, it’s trajectory is certainly an ugly one. Yet continuing to offer such actions or supposed alternatives remains the presumed course of action for the left.

Why are such political acts celebrated? In today’s world, what is there to celebrate exactly? The fact a politician is utilising the same language as us but for their own goals? Perhaps a small glimmer of hope elsewhere in the world? A single ‘progressive measure’ exercised on a faraway continent? Yet the left continues to chase such futile ventures. Why do we tie ourselves to ‘models’ which have totally failed to oppose the onslaught of the neoliberal capitalism machine?

Ideals are weak. Those who uphold them claim to be ‘mainstreaming’ (or rather hijacking) aspects of Marxism. They are delivering the gospel. In doing so, they develop communication and language which obscures our material reality and replaces active struggle with debate. The talk of ‘equality’, ‘social justice’ and ‘fairness’ only weaken the arguments of Marx and others on alienation which in today’s conditions are more valid that ever. By taking such messages to the established political sphere, they only present weak ideas in a sphere where they can either be criticised or subsumed. We must not dilute socialism for the public, but instead find new forms of propagating it.

We return to the foundation of political action. In searching for new potential trajectories the left falls into the same old and tired questions – “What must the left do?”, “What is to be done?”, “What world does the left want?”. Such questions only re-establish forms of dialogue which repeat the same old failed political projects. The predicament we are in has occurred precisely because we seek to ask such questions before confronting the products of our failures.

“The less you are, the more you have; the less you express your own life, the greater is your alienated life-the greater is the store of your estranged being.”

Karl Marx

There is but one theme we must choose to focus on – alienation. Alienation is the word which best captures and describes our present condition. Why do we continue to ignore it? Let us not delude ourselves with petty ideals. Talk of ‘equality’ and ‘social justice’ ideals only seek to keep the labourer and means of production separated but in new relationships. They only render our capacity to the change the world null. What we requires is material analysis. We need to comprehensively articulate the nature of this relationship. Whether we are propagating Marx’s own arguments or confronting our total lack of power in the face of the capitalist machine, we must no longer obscure this reality with petty idealism. Meaningful and effective forms of opposition which recognise spaces for change and potential revolutionary ventures can only emerge from such examinations and analysis.

The trajectory we are on is a an ugly one. As people alienated and powerless, we need new forms of political action more than ever. But where can we look? How do we discover them?

“Somewhere there must be a higher principle which reconciles art and action. That principle, it had occurred to me, was death.”

Yukio Mishima’s Sun and Steel paraphrased in Paul Schrader’s Mishima: A Life In Four Chapters

On the morning of November 25th 1970, Mishima left his home with fellow members of his Shield Society and headed for the Eastern headquarters of Japan’s military. Upon reaching his destination, Mishima and the Shield Society took the Commander hostage and took to the balcony overlooking the camp. There, he addressed the troops before retiring to the interior of the building and committing seppuku.

We should understand Mishima’s act not as a the final stand of a reactionary, but as that of a man who fully comprehended the trajectory and possible future trajectories of Japanese society. His body of work had built up to his final act, with his final essays and novels littered with thoughts on political expression and radical change. Mishima demonstrated fidelity to a form of expression which could not be subsumed yet retained the ability to destabilise Japanese society and lay forth the conditions for change. Mishima had waited for such a moment, knowing that other forms of action were ultimately futile in the face of the transformations he saw around him.

This is precisely what our sole goal should be; to demonstrate fidelity to new forms of political expression which can be subsumed by an already established ‘political sphere’. For us, we seek a form of expression in which the masses are no longer presented but instead present themselves, bringing an end to forms of expression action which seek only to mediate alienation. Rejecting forms of ‘activism’ which immediately presume certainty in communication and political change is key. Instead, let us confront the questions of our own power and search for those moments and events in which we can begin to make something new. The moments and events in which we can act independently and destabilise the established political order.

The time has come to smash the idealism which continues to tie us to a failing politics. We are not presented with choices; we are weak, demoralised, alienated and all of ours acts are easily rendered ineffective within a capitalist machine that turns them against us. We should no longer tolerate attempts to subsume political opposition with it. We must strive towards new forms of expression and await the moment from which a new future can emerge.

- 140.85

What I’ve just described, however, is only part of the deal. This is because not only is the employee paid to perform a task or set of tasks, the employer has much more control than that. The employer gets a say in how the worker performs the task and when and where. Frederick Taylor extended the problem from merely how much work the worker does in the time paid for, to how productive that worker is. A crucial distinction. Furthermore, he introduced science as a means to solve these problems. His theory of management is referred to as Scientific Management or Taylorism. His theory covered many subjects and was obsolete by the 1930’s, but many of its themes are still very important up to the current day. The part I want to focus on today are time and motion studies.

Taylor observed that workers forced to perform repetitive tasks tended to work at the slowest rate that goes unpunished and thus all do the amount of work that the slowest among them does. He called this soldiering. The employer would like the exact opposite state of affairs: all employees working at the rate of the fastest among them, or at the very least as fast as all of them can. Furthermore, Taylor defined a “fair day’s work” as the amount of work done by a worker in a day absent all soldiering, or the physiological maximum of that worker. Time and motion studies, then, were the means by which to achieve this vision of a “fair day’s work”. A time and motion study involves recording workers while they perform their tasks. Then each task is split up into the smallest possible component parts right down to each and every motion performed by the worker. Then each worker’s motions can be individually timed down to the tenth of a second or further and analyzed. From this the manager can take the fastest way of achieving each individual motion within the larger task and construct a composite way of performing that task taken from all the workers that is faster than any of them performed individually. This way of performing the task can then both be taught to the workers as well as monitored and enforced, increasing efficiency.

This raises a number of important points. Firstly, this all can only come about if we accept that the worker is not just paid for his or her time or even to perform certain tasks, but is to an extent owned and controlled by the employer for the duration of his or her workday. Secondly, this view explicitly sees workers as machines made of muscle and blood: “As an engineer he considered the body as a machine, which either operated efficiently or it did not.” (Schor, 1991: 58) and “this new orientation towards the careful observation and control of the very gestures of workers meant that the modern large-scale American industries incorporated not only the mechanization of tools and equipment but also, and perhaps more importantly, the mechanization and systemization of the workers, and their transformation into an interchangeable part of a working force.” (Dan, 1992: 38). Thirdly, “Taylor’s goal was the maximization of productivity, irrespective of the physiological cost to the worker.” (Karsten, 1996: 47). Unsurprisingly treating workers in a way reminiscent of Lang’s Metropolis or Chaplin’s Modern Times has a great adversarial effect on the physiological and psychological health of the worker, which we shall examine in far greater detail in a later article. Fourthly, all this ties in with the top-down approach to management discussed in the previous article and the concepts of managerialism, alienation and infantilization.

Let’s start with managerialism. Managerialism is the idea that the job of management is to direct the other employees on behalf of the owners in ways that increase the potential of the firm to earn a profit and increase the wealth of the owners. It sees management itself as a skill wholly separate from the field in which the firm operates (Burnham, 1941; Deetz, 1992). In this view it matters not whether the firm is in the steel, car, advertising, electronics or transport business, management is essentially the same.  This view in large part arises, I would argue, from the rise of mass production. As jobs are reduced to their component parts and each part made measurable on many metrics the job of managers becomes monitoring the output of the workers and applying the rules for rewards and punishments. You will note that this is itself not a productive activity in the slightest, but merely an elaborate way to attempt to solve the inherently adversarial nature between worker and owner in capitalism. This ‘solution’, however, introduces another layer to this principal-agent problem which takes place between management and owners.

Furthermore, as each job is reduced into its component parts which are in turn standardized so as to be made suitable for mass production, it is inherently deskilled. What this means is that a formerly complex set of tasks that needed to be carried out by a professional, say a chair made by a carpenter, can now be performed either entirely or in large part by unskilled labour. This goes back to the “interchangeable” part of the Dan quote above and as a result, the bargaining power of labour is diminished.

However this is not the only result. Workers are reduced from skilled professionals carrying out a job in which they can express their own creativity and exercise at least a degree of autonomy to parts of a machine that must do as they are told when they are told. In effect, workers are treated as immature, as children. Argyris (1957) argues that the design of jobs and organizations directly frustrate the normal adult human need for autonomy and control over one’s own behavior. Specifically, normal human development from infancy to adulthood involves a progressive increase in responsibility for one’s own actions, whereas in organizations every effort seems to be directed toward treating employees as dependent and remove their control over their own behavior. This infantilization of the worker is examined in some detail by Sievers: “It seems as if the only pattern most western workers can relate to is that of the child vis-a-vis its parents. Through the nature of the work provided for them the employing institutions infantilize the workers. They do not allow them to develop or mature, but limit them to regressive and familiar reactions” (Sievers, 1993: 64) and even goes so far as to argue that participation is not the answer but a further symptom of the problem, which can only be solved through democratization of work.

Infantilization in turn contributes to alienation. Whereas the skilled carpenter had a distinct relationship with the chair he or she produced, the modern workers often sees only a small part of the production process and thus may never even see or know the eventual tangible results of his or her labour. The factory worker is unlikely to ever see the finished chair, especially now that the assembly process itself is outsourced to the consumer. Blumberg (1968) identifies alienation at work as the common condition of modern man and contends that it can be substantially mitigated by worker’s participation and that people want to participate in decision making that affects their work lives. Chomsky (1993: 4) argues that “Corporations are basically tyrannies, hierarchic, controlled from above. If you don’t like what they are doing you get out”, meaning all corporations contribute to alienation.

While the specific theory Taylor developed is long since considered obsolete, the problems it at least helped create or exacerbate are still with us today. Similarly, some of his views echo through time and into the present day.  For but one example of how little things have changed, see for example factories in China, where workers perform mind-numbing and fingers and eye straining repetitive work not simply because they are cheap, but because they are cheaper than machines.

I was a little too optimistic at the end of my last article and thus we were not able to explore all of the promised subjects today. Next article we’ll go into the three human work needs and look at a model of participative management which addresses the problems of infantilization and alienation which we have discussed today. While doing so we will examine the relationship between workplace democracy and society.

Sources

Argyris, C. (1957). Personality and Organization. Harper, New York.

Blumberg, P. (1968). Industrial Democracy. Schocken Books, New York.

Burnham, J. (1941). The Managerial Revolution: What is Happening in the World. John Day Co., New York.

Chomsky, N. (1993). Letters from Lexington: Reflections on Propaganda. Common Courage Press, Monroe, Maine.

Dan Thu Nguyen (1992). The Spatialization of Metric Time: The Conquest of Land and Labour in Europe and the United States. Time and Society. 1: 29 pp. 29-50.

Deetz, S. (1992). Democracy in an Age of Corporate Colonization: Developments in Communications and the Politics of Everyday Life. State University of New York Press. New York.

Karsten, L. (1996). Writing and the advent of Scientific Management: the case of time and motion studies. Scandinavian Journal of Management. Vol. 12 no. 1 pp. 41-55.

Schor, J. (1991). The Overworked American: The Unexpected Decline Of Leisure. BasicBooks, New York.

Sievers, B. (1993). Work, Death, and Life Itself: Essays on Management and Organization. Walter de Gruyter, Berlin.

Let’s start by addressing what minimum pricing is, or, rather let’s start by addressing what minimum pricing isn’t. Firstly, it is not a Thatcheresque attempt to snatch the precious British pint from the hands of working people in the way she snatched milk from the hands of the nation’s children. It will certainly raise the price of some alcoholic drinks and it will raise the price of some alcoholic drinks bought and consumed by some of the most disadvantaged in our society; however, the average pint will be unaffected.

Basically, minimum pricing is the idea that ethanol, the thing that makes an alcoholic drink alcoholic, should have a unit price set by the government. The SNP, in the bill that has just passed, set this unit price at 50p, David Cameron wants it to be 40p. Studies suggest the higher the unit price the greater the benefit, with peak benefit being around about the 75p-£1 mark depending upon which study. But, like the Laffer curve and taxes, evidence be damned and the 50p mark probably marks a watershed beyond which the public mind is uncomfortable. Even at 40p, health benefits will be accrued and 40p is better than nothing.

It is important that one realises precisely what it is being priced here and how it will affect prices. In the UK a unit of alcohol is 10ml of pure ethanol (in the Republic of Ireland a unit is smaller). So a litre (1,000 ml) of wine with an alcohol-by-volume (ABV) of 10% has 100ml of pure ethanol in it, diluted by the rest of the wine. It thus has 10 units. A 75cl (750ml) bottle of vodka at 40% ABV has 300ml of pure ethanol and thus has 30 units. We need not worry about proof or any other method of marking the strength of a drink. Proof is no longer used in the UK. Historically it’s a Royal Navy term to describe the strength of a drink (specifically rum). If the rum was 100 proof it had sufficient alcohol in it that, when poured on gunpowder, it did not stop the gunpowder igniting. If it did prevent ignition then it was termed “under-proof” because it did not “prove” sufficiently strong. For those interested, the proof of any given drink can be calculated by multiplying the ABV by one and three quarters (7/4). So 100 proof has an ABV of about 57.14% and 40% ABV vodka is 70 proof. The only bottle of rum I have in the house is a bottle of Lamb’s ‘Genuine’ Navy Rum. At 40% ABV this is considerably under-proof and would have been unacceptable to an nineteenth century British tar and is just one indication of how alcohol strength in some drinks has gone down without the world coming to an end.

We should also note that minimum pricing differs from duty and alcohol taxes in a very important way which also explains why an increase in alcohol duty does not necessarily reduce consumption. Alcohol duties are, like VAT, a consumption tax which is added onto a base price. For the example of VAT: if the price of something, excluding VAT, is £3, the consumer pays £3.60 of which 60p goes not to the shop but to the treasury. Current alcohol taxes are (as of 28 March 2011) quite complicated but are available at the HMRC website. The kind of duty payable is dependent on the alcohol delivery method. Beer is taxed differently to wine and wine is taxed differently to spirits. Likewise alcoholic mixers (like alcopops) are taxed differently to the duties payable on the neat spirit. Unlike some of the other types of alcohol, it is simple to work out the duty for spirits One can work out how much tax should be added to spirits very easily because it is based purely on ABV. If we know the ABV then the calculation for spirits is

Tax payable = (Tax rate x (ABV/100)) x (size in ml / 1000)

For example, for 70cl of 37.5% vodka the tax payable is £6.70. This seems a little hard to credit when one realises that one can buy a bottle of vodka of that size and that strength from Asda for £8.72. Surely the base price of 70cl of vodka can’t be £2.02? It is possible that vodka could be produced that cheaply, but of course it highlights another reason why alcohol can be so cheap and why tax is not an efficient means to reduce consumption. Alcohol can be, and frequently is, used as a loss leader. For instance, Asda could lose money on the sale of every bottle of vodka but make it back on the sale of crisps or nuts or anything else. In other words, the marginal cost in tax of an item does not need to be passed to the purchaser. It usually is, in the case of VAT or petrol (to give but two examples of other consumption taxes), but it does not need to be.

Not so with minimum pricing. That vodka has 26.3 units in it. It will have 26.3 units in it even if the payable duty is cut in half or reduced to nothing. It will have 26.3 units in it as long as it continues to be that strength. At 50p per unit it must cost £13.15. It would be illegal for it to be sold for any less. £7.18 of that would still be payable in tax, but the vodka could no longer be sold as a loss leader. If the minimum price of alcohol was increased to 60p, the minimum price it could be sold at would increase by £2.63. The increase in its price would discourage purchase in a way that an increase in tax would not because it could not be absorbed by the seller. In actuality it isn’t the supermarkets that absorb the tax increases, it’s the drinks manufacturers. It is, therefore, not an additive price, like duty or VAT is. The bottle of vodka would not be having £13.15 added onto the £8.72 it is currently being sold for by Asda, it is, instead, a price floor below which the price must not fall.

Certainly, as in this example, this will increase the price of some booze. But only certain booze. Let us be clear, the majority of alcoholic drinks would be entirely unaffected by this law. Indeed you could drink three times the Chief Medical Officer’s recommended unit intake every week and still pay not a penny more after minimum pricing as you did before minimum pricing. The price of a pint in a pub certainly won’t go up. An average pint of about 2.5 units would have a minimum price of £1.25 and that is a cheap pub pint. As minimum pricing is a price floor, if the price of the drink is already above the minimum price, it won’t go up any further because the basic principle that the ethanol content must cost 50p per 10ml would already be met.

To give some examples, all from Asda:

As can be seen most of the changes of premium or named brands are not significant.  The exception here is the crate of Fosters which would cost an extra £7.34, a rise of 46%, but one that still means that one is purchasing a pint for less than £1.20; a price that brings in line with the majority of premium high strength lagers. Incidentally, a reduction of just 1% ABV, which would have minimal effect upon the taste would bring the minimum price down to under £19. The majority of these price rises are less than £2 with the exception of Fosters, the own price vodka and the cheap cider. Minimum pricing is an effective way of ensuring that the price of ethanol is not absorbed as a loss leader (as a tax can be) and it sets a price floor for the price of the ethanol in a drink.

Where concerns from the Left come in is this conflation of minimum pricing with taxation and duty. As the proportion of income spent on goods and services is greater amongst poorer people than amongst richer people, consumption taxes generally hit poorer people harder than richer people. The concern is that an increase in price brought about by minimum pricing would likewise hit poorer people harder than richer people. This is possibly true though it would entirely depend upon the proportion of disposable income spent on alcohol. Counter-intuitively, particularly to the bourgeois commentators in the soi-disant “up market” tabloids who do bang on so about “drunken chavs” and the like, professional social classes (1, 2, 3, 4) generally drink more than other classes (5, 6, 7, 8). However, this study, by the British Association for the Study of the Liver (BASL) has shown that, despite this, the health of poorer groups was more affected by the alcohol that was drunk.

BASL pointed out that alcohol-related ill health and mortality was very strongly linked to socio-economic status, with the most deprived experiencing between a three and five fold increase in death rates (health statistics quarterly 33) compared to the most privileged. For any level of drinking, lower income groups suffer more. The organisation argued that given the strong link with socio-economic status, one would predict that changes in the affordability of alcohol over time would have had the most impact on death rates in the poorer sections of society, which is what happened to liver death rates between 1991 and 2001. We know that professional groups drink more than lower income groups but, astonishingly, as the figure below shows, lower income groups suffer far more from liver disease. In the 1990s as price fell and consumption increased, liver disease increased among more deprived social groups but fell among the ‘higher’ social classes. Alcohol duty increases can therefore be predicted to reduce mortality in those lower socio-economic groups most at risk.

Figure 18: Changes in age standardised liver mortality rates (deaths / million) according to socio-economic status (Click to enlarge)

Age standardised alcohol mortality rates according to social class for 1991 -3 (1) when socio-economic status was assessed by social class, and again for 2001-3 (Health Statistics Quarterly no 38) by which time socio-economic status was assessed by NS-SEC groupings—hence the different x axes in the graph.

(Parliamentary Health Committee – First Report, Alcohol, §314)

The fact of the matter is that British drinking habits have changed significantly even since the 1970s. We drink more than we did 40 years ago and are approaching a level of alcohol consumption equal to that of the Edwardian period, a period known as the “Great Binge”. Whereas in other European countries against whom we used to measure ourselves (particularly France, Italy, and Spain) there has been an decrease in alcohol consumption, in Britain this has been increasing with correlated rises in death due to liver disease. For the first time since records in the World Health Organisation’s European HPA Database began, British deaths due to liver disease are greater than in France, Italy, or Spain. While deaths from diabetes, cancer, respiratory disease, heart disease, strokes and road accidents have all been decreasing since 1971, deaths from liver disease have been increasing and by 2007 had increased by nearly 250%.

Another accusation leveled is that because this might cost, financially, poor people more than rich people, it is a deliberate plan by the haves to stop the have-nots having any fun. This seems to the gist of some of the columns written in the Scottish Observer by Kevin McKenna.

More than 400 years later, the poor, the ugly, the ignorant and the irresponsible are still being penalised. In 16th-century Scotland, you were quite often taxed with your life or your liberty if you enjoyed yourself too much; in the 21st century, we just tax you or put it beyond your reach. Every post-devolution Scottish government seems to be obsessed with how poor people behave and this one is following the trend.

Last week, the Holyrood prohibitionists and witchfinders who run our country all filled their boots. Making good on their promise to place the demon drink out of the reach of the feckless poor, they imposed a minimum price of 50p per unit on supermarket booze…So, having done absolutely nothing of any consequence to address the obscenity of poverty and deprivation, we now deny them the opportunity to escape from time to time.

(The Observer, 20 May 2012)

That McKenna is a Labour supporter should be obvious. He denigrated the idea of minimum pricing when the SNP suggested during the last Parliament when due to their minority status they were unable to get it passed in the face of Labour opposition. Labour’s opposition was that of a severe lack of principle whereby they would support minimum pricing if the Westminster party supported it. This was a clear shirking of responsibility on the part of the Scottish Labour Party to address Scottish issues. The position of both McKenna and the Scottish Labour Party bear striking similarities to that held by John Reid when Health Secretary. In June 2004, Reid angered health campaigners for the following:

“I just do not think the worst problem on our sink estates by any means is smoking, but it is an obsession of the learned middle class,” he said. “What enjoyment does a 21-year-old single mother of three living in a council sink estate get? The only enjoyment sometimes they have is to have a cigarette.”

(The Guardian, 9 June 2004)

To some degree he has a point. We do have major problems in our most deprived areas but one of them is the lack of health and shortened life expectancy that brings. Reid (and McKenna) are hiding bourgeois disregard for the long-term health of the poorer members of society beneath a populist stance that is seemingly one of support.  Health issues affect all elements of an individual’s life. Poor health in childhood is a massive indicator of poor health in adulthood which would both affect educational opportunities and working opportunities. Those of us who stand on the left side of the fence should be applauding every opportunity to increase the health and well-being of those that are the most neglected and deprived in our society.  We should be attempting to alleviate and end the sorrows of the Precariat not enable, even encourage, them to temporarily drown these sorrows in the waters of alcoholic oblivion because of our allegiance to bourgeois neo-liberal capitalism masked as democratic socialism. Increasing personal and social health by introducing a minimum price on alcohol to reduce its consumption can go some way to doing this. To oppose a minimum price on alcohol on the principle that this is the only fun poor people have is to miss the point. It would have been like opposing installing clean municipal running water in tenements on the grounds that carrying jugs of water up four flights of stairs was the only exercise some of the residents got. The benefits that the fresh potable water brought in terms of hygiene and cleanliness outweighed the small benefit of climbing stairs. Likewise the benefits of minimum pricing outweigh the small benefit of being able to afford to drink cheap booze.

50p for a unit of alcohol is a small price to pay for decreased alcohol consumption and improved personal health and social health of thousands.