Alpha Territory

The real wealth and power of global capital is expressed in the compliance of politicians who have come to act as ushers and butlers to the wealthy...

"London now has a reputation for being the money-laundering capital of the world."

..

[Karen] Clark added that London had become the prime location for family offices, not only because of the high concentration of financial and luxury lifestyles available to meet the needs of the global super-rich but also because it offered a safe haven for those from Russia, China and the Middle East, and a more favourable tax and regulatory environment than its chief rival, New York.

--David Batty, The Observer.

~~

England: the crumbling of its empire, to the crumbling of its industrial cities, to the current crumbling of its welfare state.

It's hard to believe that England is, allegedly, the fifth richest country in the world. Perhaps it's a case of being privately rich, publicly poor. I know there are quite a few wannabe fascists who want to blame all of this on immigrants but that's because they don't want to address the more important perspective of class differences and the economic and political system which are perpetuating them. 

It's both interesting and shocking to see the growth in the number of butlers and family offices (managers of a family's private wealth). Of course, you immediately thought of Walser (but also of your friend who is, in fact, one of those managers (for a super-rich Yemeni family)). Such a nice kid as well. 

The working class 'entirely stripped of any sense of community, neighbourhood, or working solidarity by decades of right-wing social engineering.' It is precisely these people, you suspect, that have turned to the right-wing, anti-immigration, anti-Europe UKIP.

There is a loutish strain to British life (Alan Bennett, more or less, from Writing Home). Of course, some perspective would be useful: maybe England has always, since Gin Lane, been thuggish. D.H.L. may well be right: England has never had public spaces/places. This may account, in part, for the lack of civility. No, it's there on the surface, mind you (one must always keep up appearances), but you only have to scratch the surface to see a rather petty and nasty mentality rear its ugly head.

What Thatcher managed to do so successfully was give full rein to these more raw, crass and brutish tendencies, to somehow make knavish behaviour morally acceptable (greed in the city and in the suburbs was a sign, in some warped Calvinist way, that you were a free and independent person. That is, or so the myth would have it, what this country was all about: Liberty!).

So, in the Anglo-Saxon world neo-liberalsim marshalled in the transition from solidarity and equality as political ideals to the freedom, autonomy and unbounded choice of the market. But this freedom could never be an expression of a way of life since that would choke the whole project. Freedom, from then on, has became a vacuous concept, to be filled in in any way one desires or can care to think of. The only freedom worth talking about (or, more realistically, that one was permitted to talk about) was the ability to be 'free from'. And in this there was only really a childish and infantile striking out against any notion of limitation. Not as part of a modernist project to change reality since reality was now passe, a concept that had served its time. Screw reality, this was the era of 24/7 shopping/t.v., unlimited access, instant porn, trance and rave, chilling out in Ibiza, war as a spectacle.."the situation is fluid," a phrase that captured the moment, except there was no "capturing".

'To be poor now means to be endlessly assessed, monitored, and surveyed, and invariably found wanting.' But this is nothing new: when haven't the poor been counted? Isn't the birth of modern political economy contemporaneous with the birth of statistics (Foucault)? Isn't poverty in some sense created by the drawing of a poverty line and making people (feel) dependent on commodities as a way of satisfying their desires? Also, the growth of the audit culture from 1979 onward (Onora O'Neill).

How could such total, lock-step defiance of reality be maintained in a country with a formally free press and highly educated population?

Graeber is really getting to the heart of it here. That is one of the most troubling questions one could be asked. If you still believe in democracy when the economy, educational, media and cultural industries as well as the war machine are all geared to point you in a different direction then you will obviously be perturbed by the question (assuming you can still think straight). 

A subservient working-class population who, drawing on centuries of tradition, know exactly how to be butlers.

In the end, all the Blairites managed to produce was a world-class marketing sector.

Mainstream economics doesn't deal with the central problems of our times. It is still trying to solve a 19th century problem: how to allocate scarce resources in such a way as to optimize productivity.

The real problems, one feels, are far removed from this technique (for that is what it is, ultimately). Why, you might want to ask, has mainstream economics said so little about inequality or the climate? Or, if you look at a standard development economics textbook you will see very little discussion of the role of the state. Instead, you have the familiar line: the pattern of underdevelopment can be explained by some sort of market failure.