https://consciousnessofsheep.co.uk/2024/08/23/the-long-and-the-short-of-it-one-the-age-of-broke/

My regular readers will no doubt have noticed that the wave of unrest which swept across the UK recently, occurred in the kind of places I have been writing about for the best part of a decade – ex-industrial, rundown seaside, and small-town Britain which has been left behind since the 1980s. Moreover, the loudest pearl-clutching about some mythical “far right” emanates from the remaining pockets of prosperity in the affluent districts of London and the leafy suburbs of the top-tier university towns. So obvious is this divide, that we might talk about the emergence of geographical “thought bubbles” similar to those which are the online product of social media algorithms.

Class, of course, is the verboten term here. Because, in a perverse way, the neoliberal revolution dispensed with both the capitalist and the working classes. Contrary to traditional Marxian thinking, the old capitalist class was not overthrown, but was simply absorbed into an amorphous global corporate superorganism which had to create a ruling professional-managerial class to run its day-to-day operations. Meanwhile, the western working class was dispossessed and mostly turned into a powerless precariat class, pinballing in and out of low-paid, part-time, and zero-hours work, punctuated by periods depending upon the arbitrary quirks of increasingly insecure social security.

One of the things Marx got wrong was his expectation that the working class would become a “class for itself,” an essential step on the road to overthrowing its capitalist overlords and ushering in the socialist utopia. Instead, it is the professional-managerial class which emerged as the class for itself – selling the economy, nation, people, and culture down the river in pursuit of its own short-term gain. Immigration – one of the issues behind the recent unrest – for example, has been hugely positive to those living within the remaining pockets of prosperity within the UK, maintaining public services which would have been excessively expensive if the workforce had required wages sufficient to afford housing in those areas. The downside though – also related to a refusal to spend – is that ex-industrial, rundown seaside, and small-town Britain was never afforded the investment needed to cope with net migration of more than 600,000 per year. With the result that housing, healthcare, education and social care in these areas is now woefully inadequate… this is about numbers more than race or religion.

Membership of the EU resulted in a similar division, with governments of all colours sitting back and blaming EU state aid rules for their failure to prevent industries closing and jobs disappearing from rundown Britain. Even the fabled EU funding which ostensibly benefited rundown Britain, turned out to be just another gravy train for the professional-managerial class, who enjoyed huge consultancy and management fees from projects which were either designed to fail (so as to keep the region poor enough to qualify for the funding) or to become a net cost to local people (such as new roads whose maintenance would have to be funded from local taxation). Which is why places like Ebbw Vale, which had received the most EU funding, produced the biggest votes in favour of leaving the EU.

Class-based policing has also been an ongoing practice that dates back much further than the 2005 decision to increase inward migration. Broadly, the professional-managerial class has always benefited from policing where the working class (and their precariat successors) have always been its subject. Simply moving in the same social circles as the chief superintendent, local magistrates, or the chair of the police authority gave members of the professional-managerial class resources which might sway policing decisions and which might save their offspring from a criminal conviction for the kind of minor crimes which teenagers routinely used to engage in. As was noted, for example, following the discovery of cocaine residue throughout the Palace of Westminster, it is only the drugs that the precariat uses which the police choose to clamp down on.

In a similar fashion, when establishment media run stories which include both the precariat and crime, the precariat mostly appear as the perpetrators (something especially true of black communities) when, in truth, the precariat are the biggest victims of crime… especially as the upper layers of the professional-managerial class retreat into guarded and gated housing complexes. Meanwhile, far greater damage is wrought by white collar (i.e., professional-managerial class) crime which the police are largely ill-equipped even to understand, still less investigate and pursue to a successful conviction.

One of the key functions of the state in relation to this, is the management of discontent. In the 1960s, at the height of the cold war, while Westergaard and Resler were documenting all the ways in which the working class lose out, and Ralph Miliband was sketching out the socialist alternative, Britain’s rulers erected a “hard left” bogeyman to help keep the people onside. While it is true that there were a handful of tiny Trotskyist and Stalinist sects – each with their own People’s Front of Judea issues – they were never organised or strong enough to threaten the British regime. They were though, a useful device with which to smear and delegitimise popular concern and protest. On very few occasions – the protests against Thatcher’s Poll Tax being one – concern was so widespread (encompassing layers of the professional-managerial class too) that the smear tactic failed.

With the neoliberal surrender to corporate power and the accompanying disappearance of the old working class, the left (hard, soft, or medium) has been reduced to the role of useful idiots on behalf of an anti-democratic supranational corporatism. One way that we know this is from the ineffectual outcome of their protests (e.g., the Occupy Movement) and the uncoercive response of the state (Me Too, Black Lives Matter, Extinction Rebellion, etc). Only in recent pro-Palestine/anti-Israel protests have sections of the left been met with policemen in riot gear rather than flat caps and shirtsleeves.

Today, it is a fictional “hard right” which is deployed as the bogeyman to keep the masses in line. But here there is a problem. Because, unlike the hard left sects of the 1970s, which were open about their intention to overthrow the state by force, only a tiny handful of neo-Nazi sects have been committed to a similar violent overthrow of the state… and for the most part, these sects have been short-lived. Instead, the current neoliberal establishment has adopted the counterproductive dilution of the term “far right” in the way that Orwell complained about, in which “far right” means anyone and everyone that the establishment disapproves of, and in which every political opponent is literally Hitler. Indeed, in relation to the recent riots, even the establishment BBC were obliged to concede that:

“The riots have been characterised as ‘far right’ by public figures from the prime minister downwards. For many people, this description suggests the disorder was somehow organised by named, specific, formal groups or political parties; and the far right’s history of protest and violence by organisations like the National Front reinforces this idea…

“The truth is that no one organisation owned or organised the riots…”

“Right-wing extremism itself can be thought of a spectrum, rather than a coherent whole. It includes genocidal neo-Nazis treated as terrorists by the state, who hide behind online aliases, scorn campaigning, want to destroy society and venerate Adolf Hitler. But the term is also used to describe people who stand in democratic elections, engage in public campaigns and put forward policy platforms.”

Ah yes, those appalling people who have the temerity to stand in democratic elections and put forward policy platforms… might it be that the term “fascist” could more appropriately be used to describe the author of the article and, indeed, a large part of a professional-managerial class which cannot concede that its cherished neoliberal project might have failed?

More importantly, given how we got here, doesn’t this sentiment point to a brittleness and fragility among the professional-managerial class in general and its cultural and governing wings in particular? After all, if the full force of cultural soft power can no longer prevent the masses from voting for political parties which, while they do not propose to overthrow the system, threaten to break the neoliberal consensus, then they have surely lost the Mandate of Heaven.

Not least, of course, because this isn’t going away. While we can but hope that the masses have learned the hard lesson that you do not engage in street violence (no matter how much you are provoked) against a state which has been putting down popular protest since at least the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381, the riots are a symptom not a cause. The underlying cause – barely noticed by more than one in a million observers at present – is the gradual energetic unwinding of the post-war, oil age economies of the developed west. The feudal economic models which blind our sight today, cannot understand this because they are concerned only with the transactions between households and businesses. Despite no longer acknowledging Adam Smith’s labour theory of value, they continue to perpetuate the myth that labour productivity is the driving force behind economic growth when, throughout the industrial age, it has been the use of technology to harness and optimise the exergy derived from energy conversions.

The trap is that we build an economic complexity which depends on either the continuous improvement of technology (to optimise energy) or the falling cost of energy itself. But technological improvement follows an “S” curve – a series of cheap and easy improvements to begin with but followed by ever harder and more expensive improvements thereafter. In a similar manner, while economies of scale and technological improvements served to make fossil fuel extraction cheaper in the beginning, as we exhausted the cheap and easy deposits the cost began to rise inexorably. By the 1920s, the global economy had reached “peak coal” – the 1927 global shortage and price spike ushering in the Wall Street Crash and the Great Depression. By the 1970s, the developed western states had reached a similar peak in land-based oil extraction, resulting in similar price spikes and ushering in the depression of the early-1980s. Deep-sea drilling, and later hydraulically fracturing the source rock, helped offset the impact of this to a degree. But from the 1970s, the rising energy cost of energy meant that every year we lost a small part of the energy previously available to power the economy.

Core to the neoliberal revolution were three processes which ameliorated the decline for the professional-managerial class. Offshoring manufacturing to developing states in Asia served to squeeze the inflation out of the economy once far cheaper goods began arriving on western shores. Financialization allowed the mass of the population to use credit as a substitute for income, while allowing the professional-managerial class to become asset-rich. And the creation of a reserve precariat via unskilled immigration and domestic equalities law helped nail down the wages of the working (and increasingly unworking) masses.

In Britain, the oil revenues from the North Sea provided the state with a means to cushion the blow – for example, using Incapacity Benefit to get older workers out of the workforce, or the funding of local “training” schemes to hide youth unemployment. But this was revenue spending rather than capital investment. So that, once the oil depleted from 1999, and particularly after Britain became a net importer of oil and gas in 2005, there was nothing left to show for the squandered oil wealth (beyond some big numbers in bank computers in the offshore tax havens).

Since 2005 – and especially since the 2008 crash – the ability of the UK state to buy off the mass of the population has been diminishing. We see this, for example, in the authoritarian turn in social security since the 1980s. Thatcher’s concern with social security was that it prevented labour discipline – disgruntled workers could simply hand in their notice and use social security to support their family while they looked for better work. But Thatcher’s reforms were modest compared to those implemented by Blair’s New Labour and Cameron’s Tories, with the sanctioning regime plunging people into penury and often resulting in suicides and deaths from malnutrition. Most worryingly, the outgoing Tory government raised the probability of doing away with National Insurance (the last fig leaf of the pretence that we pay for our pensions and sickness cover through a contribution from our wages) which would reduce us to a state of modern serfdom.

Prior to the 2008 crash, we could talk about relative decline – the income of the precariat was still rising, but not keeping pace with the professional-managerial class. Between the Crash and the Covid, we were in a period of stagnation – the precariat income remained roughly the same or perhaps declined slightly. Since 2020 though, we have entered a period of absolute decline in which real incomes have gone backward… and not just for the precariat. Sections of the professional-managerial class have also been hit by the price increases resulting from the ill-considered policies of the government (currency-creation during lockdown, disrupted supply chains, and self-sanctioning critical Russian resources – which are likely gone forever at this point).

As I said of the local rioting in Ely last year, the surprise is not that rioting is happening in ex-industrial, rundown seaside and small-town Britain, but that it is not happening more often. Not least because each new neoliberal government has ended up reneging on its promise of a better future. Thatcher’s three governments were meant to unleash the pent-up entrepreneurial spirit of the British people, but merely ended up selling our inheritance to foreign states and international bankers. Blair’s three governments were meant to use higher education to attract and install a new hi-tech economy but proved to be a cargo cult which turned young people into student debt serfs. And whatever “levelling-up” might have been envisaged by the outgoing Tories was nullified by the Tory instinct for austerity and kicking the poor. Perhaps the one positive thing we can say about the incoming Starmer government is that at least they weren’t offering a positive vision to begin with (and their early actions seem to be bearing this out).

Government itself though, is vulnerable to the unfolding energetic implosion of the complex industrial economy of the west. And this suggests a direction of travel – though obviously not the events which unfold to take us there. The existence, scale and form of government is a product of complexity which is itself a product of the useful energy (exergy) available to us. Supranational organisations such as the World Bank, the IMF, the G7, and the GATT, are only possible in an age of mass air travel and mass electronic communications. Once air travel collapses (as the growing precariat can no longer afford holidays abroad) it will be ever harder to provide the bureaucracy to maintain these structures at their current level. Similarly, in the event that the subscription models used by the global tech corporations were to unravel, the necessary electronic communications may breakdown.

National and local governments – which are already struggling to raise sufficient taxes to repay their borrowing – will face a similar contraction. Although, again, it is impossible to predict exactly how this will unfold. However, the incoming Chancellor’s attempt to cut back on external contractors is an acknowledgement that government has to be scaled back (I’m sufficiently cynical to imagine that our current crop of ministers and paid officials are sufficiently IQ-deficient that they will likely have to employ consultants to tell them how to stop employing consultants).

Most likely though, government will simply breakdown as public services and government functions are no longer universal. We are already seeing this in the shape of boarded up high streets, potholed roads, shit-filled rivers, and a growing number of people dying in the back of ambulances. Indeed, the recent allegation of two-tier policing is largely a consequence of George Osborne’s decision to slash police budgets in the wake of the 2008 crash. If there are only so many police to go around, then something has to give… and it is far easier to withdraw police support from precariat communities than from the professional-managerial class suburbs where senior police may attract blowback.

Growing public discontent is inevitable at this point. And even if it doesn’t manifest in riots, serious problems (for our rulers) arise when people begin to walk away. Consider, for example, the establishment BBC’s unprecedented loss of half-a-million licence fee payers this year. It is doubtful that most of this decline is due to people getting tired of being fed establishment propaganda. Rather, in the aftermath of years of rising prices and stagnating wages, the BBC licence fee (which is only required to watch TV as it is being broadcast or watching the BBC i-player) is another easy cost-saving for families who would rather have food and heating. Nevertheless, as the income of the establishment media shrinks further, the government and the professional-managerial class is losing its ability to use soft power (one reason, no doubt, why they have been whipping up a moral panic around social media).

If, in the absence of some new and yet to be discovered high-density energy source, a loss of complexity is inevitable, and if this threatens the structures of government itself, the question is how might the state, and the professional-managerial class more broadly respond? It is to those issues that I will turn in the second part of this essay.