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ADDRESSING MODERN FEARS
Reviewed by ANDRE BEAUMONT
An audio file for 10 March 2013.
There needs to be a world in which the 99% can accumulate capital and not just the 1% through large corporations or in the form of large corporations themselves.
Employment and taxation policies make this currently near to impossible.
The means for the young to have a prosperous life should not be reduced to finding employment with large corporations, governments and a few professions.
Some may ask: 'why bother about capital?'
This is not a case being made out for the rich. The whole picture matters very much.
Without being able to build capital the young will not be able to find deposits for homes.
Establishing businesses requires increasing amounts of capital.
It is risible to think banks will provide the capital for these. They only just know what they are doing. Observation suggests that a percentage of customers are more business savvy and more financially sophisticated than anyone they are likely to find in high street banks.
If the small operators cannot establish businesses that last beyond five years, and using bank finance rather than saved capital hardly helps as banks are not in the risk capital business, then development of technology, know-how and intellectual property lies almost exclusively with medium and large sized companies and some government supported endeavours.
Initiative, therefore, largely lies out of the hands of the individual and in the hands of the corporate.
Monopoly can flex its muscles and civil servants get more seats at the table but the wider society suffers.
99% of the young now need to get a good job to get on the escalator which means employment in large corporations, government or a few professions. This used not to be the case. A good wage or an average salary was sufficient.
These few organisations and professions now control the gateways for anyone new wishing to make headway.
You can do something else but the remuneration is likely to be poor and you might even be a pseudo-serf for quite a while.
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11 March 2013
No one much doubts that the main purpose of work is to provide income or sustenance (which is why extensive use of prolonged unpaid internships is a retrogressive development) but the relationship between human labour and output is breaking down.
A major search engine will genuinely create wealth in making the world more efficient and creating connections but which of labour, the business systems, membership of an oligarchy, its computers or the ownership of intellectual property and platforms really produce the income stream? It is a combination of them all but few would say the labour outweighs all the rest as they might for a textile factory.
So what might one do? Certainly not flood the organisation with additional labour so that it absorbs the surplus resources. Nor tax it at a very high rate so that states can flood their own organisations with employees which normally happens when tax is high.
Nevertheless, some kind of distribution of wealth from source might be a good idea, though theoretical at present with corporate law as it is. Perhaps, in the case of one, it could give away guidance systems for driverless cars free, in effect a capital subsidy to their purchasers.
This raises questions.
What makes states more competent at distributing the wealth generated in society than other organisations? Task the WWF with the job of doing it and it could probably do it as well. For certain it could not give it all to animals.
Why is capital in the hands of individuals, where it is extraordinarily useful and productive, so punitively treated whilst it is left well alone in corporate hands?
Why the hang up with labour being better than capital when machines, computers and, soon, robots are freeing up people to be not what they do but who they are?
These questions may leave some political philosophies behind in another century.
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12 March 2013
It is not just in the obvious industries that monopoly forces are at play and all other players find themselves with a chronic shortage of capital. The art world is a £40 billion global industry dominated by a handful of auction houses and the top 1% of dealers. The famous British dealers of Bond Street and other parts of Mayfair of yesteryear are severely under the cosh because they are undercapitalised and the Cork Street galleries are facing banishment due to rising rents.
Many other dealers have given up their premises because of rents and especially rates. Their physical presence is being cut down to attending art fairs with their stock.
At a lecture series and symposium, Connectivity and the Diffusion of Power, given by Eric Schmidt at the end of January he was saying (I trust I recount as accurately as possible and there are videos for the historical record) that for the young especially people may have two identities. Their online identity is the marketing version, as it were, and their physical identity may be substantially different.
Both identities can, of course, be real and valid. 7% by value of art sales are online, a perhaps surprisingly high figure but the key is having confidence in either the seller or the nature of the product, which is usually unique. So in this industry there is already validity attached to both forms of identity. What makes the difference is capital. If you have it you can afford physical premises.
This is the reverse of the situation when I owned a business selling materials for artists and architects a few years before the millennium. We would have loved to have had a mail order operation or made use of the not-yet-nascent commercial internet but these would have required much more capital than a physical presence.
A time may come when there will be a crossover, when the online identity will sell more readily than the physical. Then the young struggling to find work or the old with a vast portfolio of knowledge and skills could provide services direct to those requiring them. True outsourcing. The sclerotic human resource industry is looking entirely in the wrong direction.
Until the crossover, and probably beyond, taxing the accumulation of capital by the 99% is a receipe for augmenting recessionary forces.
The large corporate players are not able to to provide the jobs or the enterprise required on the necessary scale any more than the auction houses and global art dealers are able to employ more than 1% of the history of art graduates.
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Envoi
Like the ancien régime, left of centre parties lack the guts, perception or inclination to tackle any of the privileges of the first estate, the large monopolist corporate players. So they seek to tax the third estate more, real human beings, in the pretence that any solution lies there, and they await their fate. Like the ancien régime they may come back one more time, two centuries after 1815, remembering everything and learning nothing, then to be discarded into the oblivion of irrelevance by the advance of the century.
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