Capitalism's about to get friendly again, according to capitalists. A couple of days ago there was a conference called Inclusive Capitalism: Building Value, Renewing Trust. The name gets to the nub of the problem, at least, that is, the problem as far as capitalists see it. For it appears that some pretty strident capitalists were the ones framing the debate at this conference. So which wealthy sages were to lend us their thoughts?
Come on down!
The Prince of Wales, Duke of Rothesay, Duke of Cornwall and King of England to be, Charles Philip Arthur George of the House of Windsor. At an estimated worth of $210 Million he would of course be my choice to spearhead a conference which seeks to understand and combat the double-headed monster of privilege and inequality. If you thought that this comically-faced royal's virtues ended at making jabs at climate change deniers, and making comparisons between world leaders and Hitler, then you'd be mistaken, because he thinks that we need a fundamental change of global capitalism in order to save the world from global warming. It's not very specific, true, but you have to admire the thrust. I mean, considering that he's not a scientist nor an economist, and many might wonder why the hell anyone should listen, he gave it a good shot.
One man who does know his stuff is Mark Carney. The newly appointed governor of England who's presided over growth of about 0.7% since being appointed in late 2012. True, a housing bubble seems to be on the cards with massive investment coming into lucrative London by rich investors, but with figures in the positive, everyone's smiling. He also knows all about the dark caverns of banking, having worked at Goldman Sachs for 13 years, an insight which apparently helped Canada in the financial crisis, where he was the Bank of Canada's governor. In the UK his salary is said to be £874,000 a year the type of wage always deemed as 'worth it', in order to get the best. According to the Daily Mail (so read with caution) he and his wife live in a £3M property in London, with a £4,800 a week housing allowance from the taxpayer. Given the context of the conference, one wonders if Carney attacked values such as that?
It's not unheard of. The Uraguian President, Jose Mujica gives 90% of his salary away to charities and small entrepeneurs, and lives on a small farm. It's a bit of an exception, though.
Carney went a little broader than individual wealth, saying that market fundamentalism had spun out of control. The financial crash epitomised the rule of privatising profit and socialising debt, of "heads-I-win-tails-you-lose", to use an appropriate money metaphor. Financial industries have to learn to be ethical, so he says. It's something that Barclays has attempted, as they are reportedly planning to ditch their sponsorship of the football league, with worries that their ethics don't match up. That's right, Barclays – Libor rate fixers, electricity market manipulators, gold price manipulators (and that's just since the financial crash) – are worried that their image is tainted by an association with football. Antony Jenkins, the new boss of Barclays also told his staff to get with the ethics – respect, integrity, service, excellence and stewardship – or leave. It's a shift in tactics, blaming the staff instead of the system. Indeed, whenever I deposit a cheque in the bank I'm sure to treat the cashier with a hefty dose of righteous contempt.
But if appealing to the consciousness of individual bankers and business leaders is not enough, then what else can we do? Enter Lagarde!
Christine Lagarde has been the Managing Director of the IMF since mid-2011. She's worth a mere $4M, and is also a politician for France's UMP, putting her neatly on the centre-right. The IMF is a great cattle prod for financially troubled countries, and only bails them out when they agree to make reforms which work in favour of the west, namely privatisation. It follows the well-known neoliberal creed that government spending is only good for private contracts and bailouts. When Greece was bailed out by the IMF and Eurozone, one massive recipient was Spiros Latsis, an oil, shipping, housing and banking man of €4 billion who'd previously bought a huge stake in Greek Government bonds. That bailout was mostly from German taxpayers, and was complemented by devastating austerity on Greece's public services, huge unemployment, and rising neo-Nazism. But at least Latsis's fortune was safe! For a more eloquent account of the IMF's questionable record, and the economic ideologies that inform it, read Joseph Stiglitz's Globalisation and its Discontents.
Lagarde's vision for capitalism is "trust, opportunity, rewards for all within a market economy – allowing everyone's talents to flourish". She noted progressive taxes, banking regulation and reform as necessary evils, that her incredibly wealthy audience might have to eventually consider. All this comes down to trust and opportunity. Indeed, the very notion of inclusively suggests opportunity, but that "inclusive capitalism" is an oxymoron is a tricky belief to dispel, especially if you have but a whisker of understanding about capitalist economics and it's legacy.
The last big hitter was Bill Clinton – America's Blair, humanitarian pioneer and sexual dare-devil. Third Way politics is a buttery paste of economic and social worldviews that lives with us now in the Siamese triplets of Cameron, Clegg and Miliband (the latter possibly slightly less so, but who knows?). The sand shifted, Thatcher put enthused privatisation on the map, and Blair and Clinton stuffed it with a less vindictive attitude. That's the Third Way – right wing economic policy and left wing social policy. As we all know, right wing economists always that the plight of the poor close to their hearts...
As for Clinton's ideas for inclusive capitalism, no online source seems to have bothered to report on it. So let's consider some other Inclusive guests. There was the Google executive chairman, Eric Schmidt. Google gobble up anything which might one day rival it, and have no sense of the concept of privacy, so it's good to have them on board. Indeed, what could be more 'inclusive' than a company that shares everything with everyone, (for profit)?
Also we have Paul Polman, previously of that pinnacle of ethics, Nestlé, and now the CEO of Unilever, a company that sells you almost everything, and has notoriously bad environmental record which is now being tackled with "corporate social responsibility" and massive expansion. Prince Charles, are you listening!?
Then there's Andrew N. Liveris, the head of Dow Chemicals, the company that used the division of labour so effectively that its workers didn't know they were producing napalm and Agent Orange to kill or otherwise disfigure innocent Vietnamese citizens and unborn babies (Warning – this website illustrates the point horrifically). Andrew's role has been to transform Dow into the socially acceptable face of lightly regulated chemicals that we can all get behind, and the awards have piled in to this end. And we all love the smell of hubris in the morning, don't we?
And a load of investment bank leaders, who as we all know are second only to the clergy when it comes to keeping a clean record. At a combined wealth of £17.8 trillion the Inclusive Capitalism conference contained just about the most exclusive group of people you could imagine. How much room for us normals do you think is likely to be granted around this 'inclusive' table?
Well there's not much room next to Lady Lynn Forester de Rothschild, co-host of the conference. She's married to a knight, of all things, who is sure to ride in with his protruding javelin erect and at the ready if a mere peasant so much as breathes in the vicinity. One suspects that Prince Charles – with his whacky but endearing environmentalist spats – was the closest thing to a peasant the Lady could find. The Rothschilds come from a family of semi-ancient banking nobility, literally nobility. They triumphed during the age of empire, turning their attention to whatever profits could be swept up, from mining to wine. They have their own coat of arms.
The conference was "conceptualised" by The Henry Jackson Society, a neoconservative think tank that sees liberal democracy as the pinnacle of civilised societies. It supports interventionism – economic and military – to meet those ends. Looking back over the past few decades of economic and military western-backed coups or invasions, like Thatcher's friend Pinochet who had warmly embraced neoliberal capitalism along with some bloody torture and murder, or the overthrow of the Iranian PM in 1953 which lead to dictatorship, and an eventual revolution with ingrained hatred towards the USA, or the more recent Iraq War, who could dispute with such a conviction?
It was also hosted by the City of London Corporation, which was the intended target of what became the Saint Paul demonstrations. The City of London is a secretive and very very old institution, holding a position in the UK as a kind of rich, powerful and quiet uncle. In the City, companies vote. Parliament has no authority over the city. They have their own police (with cooler police vans than the normal Met ones). If you (or Mark Carney or Christine Lagarde, for that matter) are looking for an answer as to why banking regulation hasn't gone far enough since the crash, then the Corporation would be a good place to start asking questions (not that you'll get an answer). More info about them here, from Mr. George Monbiot.
The backgrounds of some of these Inclusive Capitalism conference ticket-holders might make us question the real intention behind the initiative. Thankfully, we don't need to be mind-readers to find out the truth behind the smiley inclusiveness that beams out from between their gold-fillinged teeth. As this Guardian article shows, those behind the conference didn't exactly hide the fact that the conference was a gimmick to restore trust in the direction that capitalism's going. That is, not change direction, but change perception.
Conc.
At the conference, Lagarde suggested that 'Inclusive Capitalism' is the answer to the Marxian analysis of capitalism's fundamental contradictions sowing its own demise. Thomas Picketty recently wrote a much-chattered-about economic book on capitalism and inequality, noting that increasing inequality is the rule of capitalism. Capitalism's history has no doubt seen great technological leaps, but except for exceptional post-war circumstances, inequality has never let up. Lagarde never actually disputed the contradictions that Marx outlined; she and the rest were seeking a way to gloss over them so that ordinary people might not notice. Inclusivity suggests equality of opportunity, the opportunity to climb to the top of the pile. The rest of us, with our student debts and huge bills and expensive shopping lists, are pretty much condemned to play our parts in the bowels of capitalism just to get by. That sounds fairly inclusive to me.
But three decades of stagnation for most wages, and increasingly stressful and precarious work, has apparently tested the patience of workers and voters to a worrying degree, meaning the super-rich can no longer be so complacent. Perhaps, additionally, it's getting harder to paint protest movements like Occupy as a bunch of brainless, Starbucks-swilling hypocrite Trots, like a New Labour pressure group does here, as did Boris Johnson and, of course, the Daily Mail. What happens when people who aren't hippies start to realise that the hippies were right? The Occupy movements don't only care about inequality, but the vicious and vacuous nature of capitalism, the crass, materialist mantras and the closing down of alternative ways of living in favour of marketed, prescribed alternativeness, and the selfish and greedy command to undercut and outpace your neighbour to get in the ratrace and 'succeed' in the much vaunted 'social mobility' game, leaving behind the feckless dregs who were once your brethren. Capitalists are now trying to claim ownership of the narrative before they lose control of it.
There was optimism after the crash – no one really had it in them to believe that governments everywhere would seriously shit right on the heads of ordinary people just to keep their crippled boats afloat as the weight of their wealth threatened to drag them under. But they did, and the damage has been patched up with a series of phoney measures which have seen wealth of the rich accelerate at a crazy rate. And with reforms painfully lacking, and gratuitous wealth fuelling housing booms which are pricing people out, and the privatisation of the Royal Mail, the NHS and prisons etc., the people, who are just about managing to wipe the shit from their eyes, have only to find that their sinking in a whole field of the stuff. Inclusive Capitalism was a PR trick, but we don't buy it, you indignant, smug, greedy, evil fucks.
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Estimated wealths taken from the net-based source of self-loathing and ambitious fantasy, www.therichest.com
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