Thanks to friends in low places I wangled a place at a SOAS seminar on the economy with journalist Paul Mason, István Mészáros the Marxist writer, John Rees of Counterfire and the economist Graham Turner. The videos are here.
For the innumerate few subjects are more challenging and my heart sank when a handout with a load of graphs was distributed. With a bit of explanation they all made perfect sense. There was nothing but bad news in them.The one thing they all had in common was that they were heading down – ten consecutive months of decline in construction; real wages in Britain and Euroland are falling; manufacturing output relative to its peak is down 28% There has been no recovery in British manufacturing and Graham, who should know about these things, said 30% of the economy is now finance, banking and services. A policy of deindustrialisation has amplified the impact of the recession.
István Mészáros turned Obama’s light at the end of the tunnel metaphor on its head arguing that it’s a train coming rather than daylight that the president had spotted. He was confident that this will be a double dip recession – a contention that none of the other panellists dissented from. He stuck a very elegant boot into economists like Mervyn King, who only a few years ago had been eulogising globalisation and the rise of the finance sector. Quoting the Financial Times he focussed on how the new neo-liberal consensus is to radically shrink the state and the wages of those employed by it while continuing to keep afloat the parasitic finance sector. His prediction that whoever wins the election will oversee the retreat of the state rang true.
Paul Mason located himself outside the broad framework of the other speakers. He reminded us of one of the facts we’ve all got filed away somewhere, that median male hourly wages in the United States are at the same level they were in 1973. Debt is what allows people to buy homes, cars and get educated in the US and Britain and it’s what accounts for the steep increase in home repossessions despite some aid from the federal government and falling house prices. An interesting observation from Paul was that the initial neo-liberal response to the recession had been to let it rip unchecked, recreating the havoc caused by the closure of the mines and steelworks for the Starbucks era. Just as they insisted that the state back them in the good times so they demanded that it bail out the financial sector in the bad times.
It was his reply to the discussion that gave the most food for thought. Having suggested that there is a debate in some marginal sectors of capitalism he took issue with an approach that looks at how to intervening into the debate, organising demonstrations to nationalise the banks and raising demands he insisted that his audience needs to have something coherent to say to Mandelson about what proportion of the economy should be state run and where the money would come from. He was right to observe that climate change and the growth of green industries will have a big role in shaping a new economy. His prediction that in one hundred years the new technological innovations will have created a world of plenty is rather more tendentious.
John Rees dwelt more on the political aspects of the situation citing strong evidence that most people still adhere to the welfarist concept of the state – precisely the bit that both parties are bragging they are going to cut. At the same time they are not joining parties or unions in anything like the way they used to. On the other hand numbers attending demonstrations are up as are those signing petitions. These too are forms of political activity. Observing that the left has failed to rise to the scale of the challenge he pointed out that it lacks a clear voice in the debate. As a short term objective he proposed a forum in which the left could begin to formulate a view on things like the Tobin tax, the attack on the social wage and articulate a persuasive response to neo-liberalism
A much longer account would be needed to do justice to the richness of the contributors’ idea and the discussion. If time permits I might do a pen portrait of one attendee to get it out of my system. The chair, Clare Solomon said “we are going to take a few questions after which there will be lots of time for discussion.” A cat would understand that sentence. Why then does someone who obviously had some experience of offering his opinion spend five minutes rambling on about the role of labour in human societies? A rhetorical question.
Liam redux 
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