In its modern form, cargo cult behaviour involves doing something unrelated to the thing you want to happen, in the hope that it will mysteriously happen anyway. Think, for example, of the children’s game where so long as you avoid stepping on the cracks in the pavement, it will not rain. Cargo cult thinking though, is not limited to children’s games but is often deployed by adults… particularly when they lack agency over the desired outcome… how many young men down the years have turned up on dates armed with chocolates in the hope that this will result in a romantic tumble in the bedroom later on? And how many young women have turned to perfume to achieve the same end?
This kind of behaviour would be amusing but for the fact that in a neoliberal system, government itself has become a cargo cult. Consider, for example, what happened in the UK in the late-1990s. Parts of the economy – notably the City of London – had recovered from the depression of the 1980s, but swathes of the country – particularly in the north and west – were still lagging behind. The proposed “solution,” as ever, was growth. But nobody in government had the first idea what growth actually was, still less how to make it happen. Nevertheless, since governments do not get elected by holding their hands up and saying, “don’t ask us, we haven’t got a clue,” some overarching electoral pledge had to be made. And so, Blair’s iteration of the Labour Party offered a cargo cult solution – “education, education, education.”
The proposition was simple enough. The emerging “Asian Tiger” economies of the period excelled in hi-tech industries which depended upon a highly educated workforce. Britain, in contrast, was believed to have failed to invest in education and so, would not be able to operate those hi-tech industries even if it could attract them. The solution, then, was surely to massively increase the number of youngsters going to university and obtaining graduate and post-graduate education. In short, if we created enough graduates, graduate-level jobs would surely appear.
It would be wrong to say that the policy failed, since Britain’s top-tier universities have developed partnerships with some of the world’s leading hi-tech corporations. At the same time, the suburbs immediately adjacent to the top-tier universities contain the last pockets of prosperity within the UK. Rather, the problem is that the same result might have been achieved (with a lot less angst) by taking a qualitative rather than quantitative approach to education. That is, had Britain produced a much smaller number of graduates specialised in those leading-edge subject areas required by global hi-tech corporations, we would have achieved the same outcome without the need to create the downward wage pressure from an army of indebted – and increasingly angry – graduates who can’t find real graduate-level employment, and who might have fared better going through technical education or an apprenticeship.
Key to the failure was neoliberalism’s fetishising of the private sector. Rather than being run by the government, universities were to operate commercially, mostly in partnership with corporations. But instead of focussing on the educational needs of the private sector in the future, the result was that both universities and the corporations they partnered with sought immediate profits – with debt-loaded students becoming mere cash cows.
While the system continued beyond the Blair years, faced with years of Tory austerity the universities increasingly abandoned British students in favour of fleecing fee-paying foreign ones. But the model began to fracture as all but the top-tier universities faced rising costs and shrinking numbers. By some estimates, half of all UK universities run at a loss, with government regularly having to step in and bail them out. Nevertheless, there is no mood among the political class to abandon the failed neoliberal approach in favour of one operated directly by government in the long-term interest of the wider economy.
Indeed, not only has the incoming Labour government not abandoned the cargo cult approach to government, in last week’s King’s Speech, we see it expanded to areas like energy, housing and transport. Take housing for example. In the distant past, governments – particularly at a local level – actually employed skilled tradespeople and held stocks of building materials to enable them to build actual houses. It goes without saying that by the end of Thatcher’s period in government, little of this had survived. And far from rebuilding the state’s capacity to construct things, the Blair governments dispensed with what little remained… relying instead upon private corporations to do the building work – one reason why the UK has a massive housing and homelessness crisis.
The Labour pledge in 2024 is to build 300,000 new houses a year between now and 2029 (which, given that the population is growing at more than 600,000 people per year, is insufficient anyway). But Labour is not planning to employ a single bricklayer or to buy a single trowel. Which is where the cargo cult behaviour comes in. What Labour has correctly observed is that the reason for both housing shortages and unaffordable house prices is the shortage of land. That is, the housing developers are more than capable of keeping the cost of building houses to a minimum, but without the land to build them on, shortage forces prices up. And so, Labour is going to legislate to make land available – the equivalent of the child avoiding stepping on the cracks in the pavement – while some mythical “private finance” appears to pay for it all.
In the current climate, however, housebuilding targets are to private finance what garlic is to a vampire. With the economy dipping in and out of recession, and a global slowdown in bank lending, investment in new housing development began petering out several years ago – with only those projects already underway continuing. This is simply because property developers do not have wads of cash of their own gathering dust in a safe somewhere and waiting for new land to become available. Rather, they borrow the funding for the project from a bank, and then repay it with the income from the sale of the houses at the end. But in the post-covid economy, with mortgage rates around six percent, banks have simply stopped lending.
According to business rescue specialists Begbies Traynor:
“Serious concerns remain over the state of the Construction, Real Estate and Support Services sectors which represent over 40% of the companies in ‘critical’ financial distress.”
In addition to the 6,043 construction firms in critical distress (expected to enter insolvency within 12 months) a further 89,824 were in significant distress. This makes construction the most at risk sector of the economy. Moreover, the associated Real Estate and Property Services sector is the third most at risk, with 5,575 firms in critical distress and 65,919 in significant distress. This is a particular problem in the social housing sector, as James Riding at Inside Housing explains:
“New build projects are already being delayed and cancelled across the country due to ‘significant financial pressures and uncertainty’, housing providers warned…
“Rental income is 15% lower in real terms than in 2015, while each social home will require up to £50,000 over the next 30 years in maintenance and retrofit costs.
“Reflecting these financial pressures, housing association starts of new homes in England were 30% down last year compared to 2022-23, with ‘further falls expected this year.’”
The bottom line is that if government wants to come anywhere near its housing target, it is going to need to provide direct funding, because the fabled private financiers have left town, leaving construction and property management companies with a giant debt mountain on their balance sheets. But, as Dagenham Liz Truss discovered two years ago, unbacked commitments of this kind tend to cause international finance to experience a dose of the vapours leading to the cost of government borrowing going through the roof (and jeopardising pension and insurance funds along the way). Which is why incoming Chancellor (and Grand High Witch lookalike) Rachel Reeves has already played the “there’s no money” card.
We can expect something similar from Ed Miliband’s new Great British Energy, which aims to achieve the impossible (unless, perhaps, we can persuade China to build and operate them for us) task of building out a massive fleet of wind farms in an effort to make the UK energy independent. As with housing, Miliband is not about to employ anyone, still less build and equip the necessary factories and supply chains (which no longer exist in Europe following the loss of the cheap Russian gas which used to power the factories). And so, it will fall to the magical private finance fairies to wave their wands and conjure into existence the funds to even begin the project. But as with housing, wind farm operators have been burned in recent capacity auctions because they are unable to deliver at a low enough price for the wider economy. The cargo cult behaviour, then, is government changing planning laws to make more land (and offshore zones) available to private windfarm developers, but with no means of encouraging or forcing them to build.
Even the plan for the railways – which at least creates a single, publicly-owned, national management body – will recreate many of the existing problems if it continues to involve the private sector in the fragmented delivery of everything from tickets to tracks and to trains. And yet, the neoliberal mindset demands this of an already highly fragmented railway system in which trains, tracks, stations, and ticketing are owned or operated by separate private companies. So that a continued reliance on private finance with only the top-level management in public hands, risks continuing the same problems which have beset the railway system for decades.
During the Blair years, when the UK still enjoyed the receipts from oil and gas exports from the North Sea along with the trickle-down income from a City of London providing financial alchemy to a global economy unknowingly speeding toward its 2008 nemesis, this cargo cultism was affordable, even if it represented a gross misallocation of the UK’s remaining capital. In 2024, a UK economy still reeling from the impact of the 2008 crash, compounded by Brexit, lockdowns, and self-destructive sanctions is already falling apart, with the electorate demanding an alternative to the failed neoliberalism of the previous half-century. This time around, not only is more cargo cultism unaffordable, but its inevitable failure will drive exasperated voters into the arms of the national populist parties of left and right.
It is time for the political class to wake up and understand that some critical infrastructure and public services are simply too important to leave to corporate financial institutions concerned solely with today’s bottom line. And rather than handing out lavish contracts (mostly absent of even basic penalty clauses) to these vultures, it is time to revive the Department of Public Works; employ the necessary workforce (and offer much needed apprenticeships); purchase the tools and materials and cut out all of the lenocrats. Because it they don’t, I fear the path they are on leads to gallows or guillotines on Parliament Green.The last working-class hero in England.
Clio the cat, ? July 1997 - 1 May 2016 Kira the cat, ? ? 2010 - 3 August 2018 Jasper the Ruffian cat ? ? ? - 4 November 2021
"… how many young men down the years have turned up on dates armed with chocolates in the hope that this will result in a romantic tumble in the bedroom later on..."
- having consulted anthropoligists and historians...none in the last fifty years at any rate: showing his age somewhat with this one.
On "Education, Education Education" he appears to miss that the main aim of the policy was to park large numbers of unrequired young people out the way because there were too few job oppertunities... thus fiddling the unemployment figures and indeed getting them to take on student loans, thereby effectively paying for several years of their own unemployment whilst essentially on a papershuffle.
The debasement the higher education sector and it's qualifications was an easy price to pay, whilst starting a career as a serious debtor would doubtless make for a more maliable workforce...and of course introduce the young people into their new "rentier" future.
He is of course correct on the continuing fetishisation of the private sector...and on that I notice my Postman Pat of yore with the his little red van and gold crown logo is now a dude in a glow-vest driving an "Arnold Clarke self hire."
It struck me that there are two things necessary for foreign (US) investment in construction in the post-Brexit UK:
(A) an ideological assurance that the UK government does not have a money tree or any will to intervene other than cosmetically perhaps,
(B) Debasement of the on-shore construction industry. In fact much as the nascent UK space industry was debased in the 1950s, not to mention domestic nuclear, perhaps, etc.
His article seems to make a case for both A and B. I can’t help feeling that the incoming Liabor Oxbridge crop have had plenty of time to become familiar with their brief (and to have been selected on the basis of their quiet enthusiasm for it), and have a more coherent plan than he gives them credit for. We shall see, I guess.
US investors have money looking for a place to grow. That place does not look to be Russia or China in any big way any time soon, which probably means everyone else stepping up to the plate.
From 1974, so outdated terminology that some would find problematic, but he makes a solid case IMO for the cargo cults being an expression of native resistance against colonisation, demanding a share in the wealth that the invaders had taken from them in the form of land, resources and human labour. Typos mine:
Any human activity will appear inscrutable if it is jigsawed into snippets too small to be related to the overall historical picture. Viewed over a trajectory of appropriate length, cargo shows itself to be the working-out along lines of least resistance of a stubborn lopsided conflict. Cargo was the prize in the struggle for the natural and human resources of an island continent. Each snippet of savage mysticism matched a snippet of civilized rapacity, and the whole was firmly grounded in solid rewards and punishments rather than phantoms.
Like other groups,savage and civilized, whose dominions and freedom are threatened by invaders, the people of Madang tried to make the Europeans go home. Not at the very beginning, because several years elapsed before the invaders displayed their insatiable appetite for virgin lands and cheap native labor. Nonetheless, the attempt to kill off the enemy was not long in coming. It was doomed to failure because, as in so many other chapters of colonial warfare, the contending forces were drastically ill-matched. The Madang natives suffered from two insuperable handicaps: They lacked modern weapons, and they were fragmented into hundreds of tribelets and villages incapable of uniting against a common enemy.
The hope of using force to drive the Europeans away never quite disappeared; it was repressed, but not extinguished. The natives backed off,and came forward again along what seem like crazy tangents. The invaders were treated like arrogant big men--too powerful to be destroyed, but still perhaps not invulnerable to manipulation. To get these strange big men to share more of their wealth and to moderate their appetite for land and labor, the natives tried to learn their language and penetrate their secrets. And so began the period of Christian conversion, abandonment of native customs, and submission to taxes and labor conscription. The natives learned "respect" and collaborated in their own exploitation.
This interval had consequences intended and foreseen by neither party. Separate and formerly hostile tribes and villages came together to serve the same master. They united in the belief that Christian big men could be manipulated into creating a state of paradisaical redemption for all. They insisted that cargo be redistributed. This was not what the missionaries meant by Christianity. But the natives acted in their own self-interest in refusing to let Christianity mean what the missionaries wanted it to mean. They insisted on making the Europeans act like true big men; they insisted that those who possessed wealth were under the obligation to give it away.
Westerners are impressed by the natives' amusing inability to understand European economic and religious lifestyles. The implication is always that natives are too backward, stupid, or superstitious to grasp the principles of civilization. This certainly misrepresents the facts in Yali's case. It was not that Yali couldn't grasp the principles in question, but rather that he found them unacceptable. His tutors were amazed that someone who had seen modern factories in operation could still believe in cargo. But the more Yali learned about how Europeans produced wealth, the less was he prepared to accept their explanation of why he and his people were unable to share in it. This doesn't mean that he understood how the Europeans got to be so wealthy. On the contrary, when last heard from he was working on the theory that the Europeans had gotten rich by building brothels. But Yali always had the good sense to dismiss the standard European explanation, "hard work," as a calculated deception. Anyone could see that the European big men--unlike their native prototypes--scarcely worked at all.
Yali's understanding of the cosmos was scarcely a monopoly of the savage mind. In the South Seas, as in other colonial areas, the Christian missions enjoyed a virtually unchallenged mandate to provide the natives with an education. These missions were not about to disseminate the intellectual tools of political analysis; they did not offer instruction in the theory of European capitalism, nor did they embark upon an analysis of colonial economic policy. Instead they taught about creation, prophets and prophecies, angels, a messiah, supernatural redemption, resurrection, and an eternal kingdom in which the dead and the living would be reunited in a land of milk and honey.
Inevitably, these concepts--many rather precisely analogous to themes in the aboriginal belief system--had to become the idiom in which mass resistance to colonial exploitation was first expressed. "Mission Christianity" was the womb of rebellion. By repressing any form of open agitation, strikes, unions, or political parties, the Europeans themselves guaranteed the triumph of cargo. It was relatively easy to see that the missionaries were lying when they said that cargo would only be given to people who worked hard. What was difficult to grasp was that there was a definite link between the wealth enjoyed by the Australians and Americans and the work of the natives. Without the cheapness of native labor and the expropriation of native lands, the colonial powers would never have gotten so rich. In one sense, therefore, the natives were entitled to the products of the industrialized nations even though they couldn't pay for them. Cargo was their way of saying this. And that, I believe, is its true secret. (Cows, Pigs, Wars, and Witches, pp.149-152)Tell your story; Ask a question; Interpret generously http://storybythethroat.wordpress.com/tell-ask-listen/
Re: Marvin Harris' interpretation of the original cargo cult phenomenon
'The unerring right from wrong by the natives' - indeed, shows the incredible resilience and flexibility of the human spirit that they were able to kindle a resistance movement from missionary christianity of all things, turning it against the oppressors. That's real talent!
on July 24, 2024, 8:31 am
