Date: Thu, 11 Feb 1999 21:43:09 -0500 From: Eric Fawcett Subject: s4p-98: John Ralston Saul on corporatism The Australian 15/01/1999 "The truth is out there, unfortunateley" John Ralston Saul Truth is back - the sweeping truths characteristic of the great religions, of Marxism and facism. In other words, ideology is back. And superstition. After all, what is superstition but believing without understanding? As Mussolini put it: "The crowd doesn't have to know. It must believe" The return of inevitability to public affairs has been one of the great surprises of our time. Public policy is no longer about choice but about the micro-management of what is going to happen anyway. Today the elite itself is expected to believe with the fervour of the crowd. The natural balance of the marketplace and the inevitability of globalisation on its own terms must be taken as absolutes by anyone - from New Labourites to neo-conservatives - who doesn't want to be marginalised. Yet neither the marketplace nor globalisation rings true as our own real ideology. After all, if we do believe in such things as the beneficial power of competition, then why has no one across the political spectrum protested against the growing wave of large corporate mergers? The unleashed, global marketplace was supposed to produce more competition not less. Every analysis shows the larger the corporation, the less effective, less innovative, less efficient, more top heavy, more afraid of risk and of long-term new investment. These are the mergers of a fearful technocracy attempting to transform the marketplace into a bureaucratic certainty. The lack of protest is reminiscent of the old Marxists who were always in that interim phase necessary to bring about their utopia. Even stranger is our religious approach towards privatisation. Selling off public enterprises is supposed to improve them by introducing competition. And by reducing government we are meant to unleash the economy. Handled moderately, you can understand these arguments. Used as abstract absolutes they make bad economics. Although the money markets today are gigantic, they are largely made up of speculative capital or money for the private technocracy to play around with in their mergers and acquisitions. There is, as there has always been, a great shortage of investment capital. It needs to be concentrated on real new investment if we want real growth. Instead, through massive privatisation, we have been draining that small pool - wasting it in effect - by investing it in the gigantic, infrastructure of the already developed public sector. In order words, massive privatisation slows down the marketplace. And it rewards the failure of the private technocracy to act as capitalists. Instead we have encouraged them in their delusions by handing them coupon clippings activities at the head of heavy, naturally monopolistic infrastructures. These aren't capitalists. They are managers in capitalist drag. The real ideology of our day is not competition or the market place or globalisation but an old fashioned global theory called corporatism. We are experiencing its fourth attack on modern western society, the first having come with Napoleon. If you strip away the violence, racism and uniforms of the regimes of the 1920s and 30s, you find precisely those arguments which today have universal respectability. The idea of society has been replaced by a multiplicity of interest groups and specialists. Our primary loyalties are to those groups. The whole structure is run through constant negotiations within and between the groups, all based on self interest. We call this "interest mediation". Efficiency, professionalism and loyalty are the characteristics most talked about and in theory rewarded. The idea of the public good is marginalised. And democracy continues more as a steam release device than anything else. The most we can hope for is the human face of neo-conservatism, a la Bill Clinton or Tony Blair. The responsible individualism of those inside the elites is if anything more castrated than elsewhere in the population. As a result there is a growing atmosphere of courtierism in our elites; a worship of form over content; a disturbing mix of arrogance and self-loathing. You can see this is the sort of educational reform being proposed in most western countries. Some aspects, such as smaller classes, are more than welcome. But much of what is proposed is a century out of date and reflects the old 19th-century corporatist prejudices: business involvement in setting the educational agenda; highly "practical" training at as young an age as possible; getting "them" out to the workplace as fast as possible. All of this represents the form over content, Weberian obsessions of the business schools, which have not changed their fundamental ideas since Harvard was created earlier in this century. This whole approach is based on average life expectancies of 50 years and slow technological change. In today's continual technological revolution an education centred on practical training is a preparation for rapid obsolescence. It obscures our need for th sort of independent, flexible thought that will be key to survival at all levels as change continues. Worse still, this approach ignores the greatest revolution of the 20th century: a 50% increase in life expectancy. Education, but more than education, needs to be completely rethought to deal with our new long lives. There is no rush to get people into the workforce. There is time for the first time for a wider-based not narrower education. Early retirement is an unfinanceable proposition in the long term and a waste of accumulated experience. There is now ample time for the sort of citizen participation which our corporatist society has quite naturally marginalised. We need to be rethinking not only the relative speeds of the phases in our lives, but their respective order and lengths. In a sense, what we need to do is to take 5 to 10 years off the last third of that process and put it into the first part of our lives.