The General Theory of Revolution in the Nineteenth Century by Pierre-Joseph Proudhon

My track record with reading lengthy 19 century texts is not great (I have a whole shelf-full of unread nineteenth century philosophy glaring at me right now). Lack of context is something which really irks me when reading older works but mainly I just have the attention span of a goldfish and I struggle reading anything that isn’t specifically tailored for my television addled brain. That said if I’m going to call myself a mutualist then I really ought to read some Proudhon. So I’m going to try reading his General Idea of Revolution in the Nineteenth century. I found it online here but it’s not in a format that is that convenient to read so I downloaded it and tailored it into a pdf for my Sony Reader. I’d like to say that I’ve flown in the face of copyright laws and that this publishing is itself an act of righteous anarchy but the original work and the translation are both in the public domain. Happy reading:

The General Idea of Revolution in the Nineteenth Century by Pierre-Joseph Proudhon (pdf)

The General Idea of Revolution in the Nineteenth Century by Pierre-Joseph Proudhon (doc)

Mutualising the housing market

Obviously I shouldn’t be reading the Times because it’s a shareholder owned organisation of the very worst kind but I accidentally did today and there was a letter in the letters section from Dr Chris Handy of the Commission on Mutual and Co-operative Housing which I’d never heard of. I took a look at their website and saw that the Commission recently (26/11/09) launched their report. I haven’t read the report but I’ll try to in the next few days. I suspect that it only looks at co-operative housing in its social housing context. As a mutualist I must look at co-operative housing as a wider solution to the entire housing market.

Mutual housing is something that I think about a lot. In my efforts to mutualise my life I’ve found it fairly easy to buy mutual food and clothes  but housing is a whole other ball game. Housing is for almost everyone the single biggest cost that we incur in our lives. Mutualists can bleet on about the labour theory of value (and I do) but at the end of the day if I want somewhere to live then short of going to the government for social housing I am going to have to enter the housing market either as a tenant or a homeowner. I’ve sort of made the wishy-washy commitment that I’ll never personally profit from the housing market but I don’t own a house so it’s hypothetical posturing which I could easily be forced to abandon were the devil to drive in the future.

Modern mutualism needs to find a roadmap to not just the co-operatisation of social housing but the co-operatisation of all housing. That’s the only way to bring the roulette table of the housing market to an end.  If housing costs were to veer back towards labour cost (ie the labour cost of actually building house and extracting the raw materials to do so) then this would significantly reduce the financial burden on households. The reduction of the financial burden on households would I think directly and immediately help to improve general happiness.

In the utopian mutualist society all land would be free because no one built it. I’m advocating mutualism as an achievable and viable solution now so that may make me sound like some radical hippy idealist and in a way it is because on a practical level there isn’t really any free land to be had. The vision of free mutually or privately owned land is one that I think is worth pursuing though. The only way that I can see that it can be pursued is either through government owned land being mutualised or through the acquisition of privately held land.

The mutualisation of housing would take vast amounts of capital because of this requirement for the acquisition of land. Once acquired the land would be held in mutual trusts with the proviso that no one would ever be allowed to profit from either the land or the buildings built on that land.

I’ve toyed in the past with the idea of encouraging people to mutualise their own homes but this is a huge ask of anyone. Mutualising your home is simply a matter of agreeing never to profit from it. That’s fine if you stay in the same home for the whole of your life but nowadays people frequently find that they need to move and to move you need to buy more property which means that you will need to realise your existing property on the housing market.

Perhaps we could create a network of mutualists who agree not to profit from housing within the network but where mutual housing was not available members would be permitted to reenter the housing market. The proviso would be that any house you acquired on a mutual basis could not then be sold on the open market at a profit at least not so that the member could personally gain.

Not-for-profit media

As an increasingly committed mutualist I am trying to make an effort to avoid buying from capitalist, shareholder corporations wherever I can.

Despite being very sceptical of the whole concept of "news" (I’ll write about that elsewhere) I do spend a fair bit of time trawling through the news websites each day. So what are my options with regard to media?

The first place for anyone in the UK to start is the BBC. The BBC has one of the world’s most popular websites. Unfortunately BBC news is on the whole bland to the point of inanity and for that reason I’ve completely gone off it. I like my news long and dense and challenging and in my opinion BBC news is none of those things.

There’s also a good argument to say that government funded organisations although nominally not-for-profit are still through their source of funding part of the for-profit economy.

The other site which I’ve been reading a fair bit recently has been guardian.co.uk. The Guardian is owned by Guardian Media Group which is in turn owned by the not-for-profit Scott Trust. The Guardian is unashamedly though not admittedly left wing.

Here’s some news via the Guardian about a not-for-profit news project in the US called the Bay Area News Project. Also mentioned in the article are Centre for Public Integrity and ProPublica. I’d be interested to know if there were any similar projects in the UK.

Here’s a list of not-for-profit media organisations as well.

What other not-for-profit media outlets are there?

Commission on Ownership launched

Today Labour announced the launch of a Commission on Ownership to be chaired by Will Hutton. Here’s the announcement from Mutuo. And here from Jonathon Michie of Oxford Centre for Mutual and Employee-owned Business at Kellogg College, Oxford University which will be running the Commission. It’s great news even if nothing comes of it. From Tessa Jowell:

Of course, mutualism cannot be prescribed by government. By its very nature, it is driven by and relies on the commitment and active participation of the people involved. Communities need to be able to choose mutualism as and when they see fit. What government can do is sponsor and provide a legal framework that makes mutualism a practical proposition in the delivery of any public service.

Words to warm the heart of any anarchist.

So is this it? It’s nearly 145 years since the death of Proudhon. Are we finally seeing the dawn of the age of mutualism?

Climate change and mutualism

If you look up mutualism in an encyclopedia or dictionary you’ll find that it has two meanings: one economic and one biological. In biology mutualism is used to describe a relationship between living organisms from which both derive a mutual benefit. The opposite of biological mutualism is parasitism.

There are clear similarities it seems to me between capitalism and parasitism. Under capitalism we are individually encouraged to pursue our own ends not necessarily to the detriment of but certainly with a fair degree of indifference towards those around us. Just as a parasite leeches goodness away from its host so under capitalism we are constantly looking to make profits from one another.

Capitalism and parasitism also have in common that they both work to a certain degree. Capitalist societies do work. People are able to pursue happiness and have offspring. Successful ecosystems do contain parasitic relationships. I believe that mutual relationships in both cases work better. Mutual relationships minimise suffering and maximise happiness.

In nature it is not uncommon for parasites to eventually kill their hosts. As long as they have had time to reproduce and broadcast enough offspring then the parasite has no further need for the host. Examples within capitalism of companies killing their customers are not that common or clear-cut but they certainly exist. The number one killer in the world is heart disease of which the major cause is poor diet and lifestyle. The alcohol, tobacco and food industries play no small part in prematurely killing millions of people every year. As long as they hit their profit forecasts however, governments and shareholders are happy.

The news at the moment is dominated by talk of climate change. In fact it has been for a few years now ever since that film by Al Gore which I’ve never quite been able to bring myself to watch. Al Gore has obviously played a huge role in putting the climate change issue front and center but he also played a large role in politicizing the issue. This politicisation of the issue is now playing havoc with efforts to do something about it. The political right, especially in the US, has now developed a suspicion verging on paranoia that climate change is being used by those with a socialist agenda to extend government control and redistribute wealth.

Climate change is only a symptom of the wider problem of capitalism. The destruction of the environment almost always comes about as the direct result of the pursuit of profit and/or economic growth. As long as capitalism forms the basis of our economies then that pursuit of economic growth will never end. Wealth will never deliver true happiness so the pursuit of wealth is futile. That futility in turn encourages us to pursue growth ever more aggressively.

The current junket in Copenhagen is funded from the spoils of capitalism. When all the politicians and scientists and NGO’s return to their respective countries and put in their expenses claims the tab will ultimately be picked up by taxes levied off companies and employees of companies who caused the climate change in the first place. I don’t doubt that some of the politicians have the bravery and foresight to realise that they might need to bite the hand that feeds them. Despite the claims of the Left I suspect that the hand in a lot of cases realises that it might need to be bitten as well. That doesn’t solve the problem that if you bite the hand that feeds you then you still need to eat.

It’s not just capitalism either. Socialist governments have in the past been some of the most ruthless destructors of the environment. This is because socialist governments were just as focussed on economic growth as their capitalist counterparts.

I believe that mutualism is a far more efficient system than either capitalism or socialism. Capitalism suffers from enormous waste, duplication of effort and over consumption. Socialism suffers from all the inefficiencies of large, centralised, top-down organisations. Both systems are obsessed with power and control.

The only way to truly tackle the climate change issue is to start turning our backs on capitalism and start mutualising our society. If we refocus our society on the pursuit of happiness instead of the pursuit of profit then I’m sure that we will see a drastic reduction in environmental destruction.

John Lewis on the perversion of capitalism

I’m just listening to a BBC podcast about employee ownership. (I’d link to it but it won’t be accessible in a few days  . The podcast contains a great extract from a recording of John Spedan Lewis from 1957:

“The present state of affairs is really a perversion of the proper working of capitalism. It is all wrong to have millionaires before you have ceased to have slums. Capitalism has done enormous good and suits human nature far too well to be given up as long as human nature remains the same. But the perversion has given us too unstable a society. Differences of reward must be large enough to induce people to do their best but the present differences are far too great.”

“If we do not find some way of correcting that perversion of capitalism, our society will break down. We shall find ourselves back in some form of government without the consent of the governed, some form of police state. The dividends of some shareholders exceed their own highest hopes, hopes that may have been much too greedy, and the incomes of the more fortunate of the captains of industry are many times as great as would have caused the same persons to work just as hard and for just as many years if, instead of going into business, they had happened to become, say, lawyers or doctors. This is quite wrong.”

This isn’t some crazy anarchist or communist speaking. This is the founder of one of the largest, oldest and most successful retailers in the UK. You can listen to the whole recording here on the John Lewis website.

Also someone says at the beginning of this show

“A lot of people think it’s a co-operative, some kind of socialist experiment. We’re not doing that and we honestly believe that it’s far more profitable than it ever would be than if there had been a couple of partners sitting around trying to direct a host of others that were working for them.”

Well, surely an employee owned organisation is fundamentally socialist because the workers own the means of production. That’s the definition of socialism. Also, there’s a very fine line between a worker co-operative and an employee owned company.

Advertising consumption

Great post on the PsyBlog today

Nowadays the word ‘obesity’ is rarely seen in print without its partner-in-crime, ‘epidemic’. The developed world seems to be intent on eating itself to death and no small proportion of the newly obese are children: one-third in the US, with a further third at risk.

So where should we place the blame for this epidemic? Perhaps our families, our environments, or our famine-anticipating genes or maybe our increasingly affluent societies (you’ve never had so good, now eat a hot dog!).

Maybe, but what about apportioning some blame to the people who are working overtime to sell us unhealthy food in the first place? Children in the US, for example, are exposed to 15 TV commercials for food each day, that’s almost 5,500 in a year, with 98% of these adverts promoting products high in salt, fat and sugar.

Food companies, of course, argue that their adverts are all about brands. Commercials don’t encourage you to eat more, they say, but suggest you buy their brand over the others. Previous research on this connection tended to show only modest associations between advertising and unhealthy eating patterns and much of the evidence was circumstantial.

However, a new study published in Health Psychology carried out by Dr Jennifer Harris and colleagues at Yale University, reveals some striking results and should refuel the debate about snack food advertising and obesity (Harris, Bargh & Brownell, 2009).

Clive Hamilton lays a lot of the blame for consumerism at the feet of marketers and advertisers. I’m inclined to agree with him.

Topic of thought for the week: What would be the fate of advertising under a mutualist economy?

The Disingenuity of Capitalism

In a short term role recently I was involved in one of the many minor deceptions which daily oil the creaking worldwide wheels of capitalism.

The overseas head office of the company I was working in had set a profit target at the beginning of the year which was at risk of being missed. As a result the local office brought in a number of measures to find more profits. One of these measures was an across the board price increase. My job was to prepare a document for the sales team with a list of after the fact justifications for the price increase; a price increase which was purely to satisfy a growth expectation in the market. I came up with a few shoddy justifications which basically came down to saying "We’re inflating our prices because everyone else has been". It would have been a poor excuse even if it had been true. As it was, all the input costs had fallen. This was pure profiteering.

Escalations always start somewhere. They usually start with an act of bad faith. This time the act was mine.

Blaming inflation on inflation is something you frequently hear from politicians. "Prices have gone up because prices have gone up". I’ve been thinking about inflation a lot recently. I’m not an economist, I’ll admit my ignorance before I demonstrate it, but the whole thing just doesn’t add up to me. Inflation has various causes but the primary one is generally considered to be the supply of money. Even though there are probably equations to prove this I just don’t think that it tells the whole story. What is it that makes someone put up a price? Is it because they can or because they have to? Frequently people and businesses find that they just have to increase their prices. The family which outgrows its house and needs to move has to try to make as much money as it can because everyone else in the housing market does exactly the same. A company whose input costs increase almost certainly will have to increase its prices at some point. Like any escalation though, it had to start somewhere. Someone once upon a time must have just decided to increase their price for the simple reason that they could. From that moment on it just escalated. Inflation is just an economic arms race and it’s time we called an armistice.

The more I think about it, the more I think that inflation is just a massive sham. The wicked witch of inflation and her benevolent cousin, economic growth, are surely the soylent green or Eurasia of our age: illusory carrots and sticks with which the elite can control the masses. I don’t even think it’s as calculating as that because many of the elite feel just as constrained by inflation and economic growth as the people they are trying to control with it.

Could mutualism crack the nut of inflation? I have my doubts whether it could completely. The pressures on wage inflation in particular would still be there. One thing is for sure: life would be a lot simpler without inflation so it’s a dream worth pursuing

The defining feature of capitalism for me is its disingenuity. From the platitudes of the corporate world (the customer comes first; its people that matter) to the accepted lies of advertising, almost everywhere in the capitalism you will find one person trying to deceive another in order to make a profit. Even in the most candid exchanges as between a lone manufacturer and a customer there is often an undercurrent of deception. Like a bank robber steeling bullion from a vault, how much can I get away with? is the recurring question running through the salesperson’s head.

I am an accountant by training. Most of accountancy is about managing the little individual acts of deception which make up the capitalist system. It’s about keeping the deception at just the right level. If it gets out of hand then the whole system breaks down. There’s a very fine line between telling someone that buying your product will make them cool and telling someone that buying your product will make them rich.

Mutualism can no doubt be disingenuous at times as well. In an economy where the only thing which has value is labour, the valuation of that labour becomes incredibly important. Valuing your labour at $110 an hour as opposed to $100 is going either increase your wealth or your available leisure time. Therefore there is a similar incentive to deceive between a producer and a consumer as in capitalism.

One way to reduce the deception in mutualism would be to be absolutely open about salaries at all times. For everything you buy you should be able to know how much the person was paid to make it or provide the service.

Growth, Guns and Railways – a few books I’ve read recently

Growth Fetish by Clive Hamilton
Elias recommended I read this book and it has completely blown my mind. It’s more than that though. It has changed my thinking. Reading it is like having an intellectual uranium-enriched cluster bomb going off in your head; just as you’re reeling from the initial impact of the explosion the smaller cluster bombs start going off and when it’s all over you’re left with the warm perpetual glow of irraditation. It took me ages (a couple of weeks) to read it because it was just making me think so much. I had to stop after every sentence just to let my thoughts settle down.

I’m absolutely convinced by the central argument. We need to abandon economic growth. We have all the technology and wealth we need to live happy lives. We need to stop and think. We need to reorganise our society to employ our abundant technological and intellectual resources in a way that maximises our happiness not just now but sustainably forever.

I’d quote from the book but if I start quoting I’ll never stop. Just read it.

My only criticism of Growth Fetish is that Clive Hamilton stops short of rejecting capitalism outright. His solution just sounds like a more radical version of what the major parties are already proposing. The current political spectrum proposes many ways to tame the beast of capitalism. The free-market right tells us to just saddle up and hang on for the eight seconds. The liberal left wants to fence it in, put a ring through its nose and tame it. The truth is we don’t need to the beast. The model of the modern mixed economy with a public sector funded by tax revenues levied from a capitalist private sector is just flawed in my opinion. Growth is inherent to capitalism. As long as capitalism remains at the heart of our economy we will never release ourselves from the self-imposed mantra of economic growth.

That’s just my opinion though. Don’t let it put you off. This is a brilliant and important book. Everyone should read it, urgently.

Also, Clive Hamilton is standing as a Greens candidate in the Higgins by-election in Melbourne. If you live in the constituency and even if you don’t support the Greens you should vote for this guy. He’d single handedly double the IQ of the Australian parliament if elected.

Guns, Germs and Steel by Jared Diamond
This book is brilliant. It’s so refreshing to read a book with such breadth of the scope which is also so concise. I’m sure anthropoligists have lots of things to nitpick about in his argument and no doubt new evidence will arise which refutes some of his arguments but the great thing this book does is blow open your perspective. We live in a world in which stock market results are reported on a minute by minute basis. A world in which politicians crow about the last quarter of growth. A world in which people get excited about a double digit annual rise in the housing market. When you step back, as this book forces you to, these things pale pitifully in comparison to the developments which humans have gone through in the history of our species.

This book opened my eyes to a number of things.

Firstly it made me look at our society in its proper context. All of the things that we need to live happy lives have existed for centuries if not millenia. Most of the foods that we eat every day were domesticated thousands of years ago. We’ve known how to build houses for millenia. We think we’ve come such a long way but in truth the lives we live today are not at all dissimilar to the lives which people lived a thousand years ago or even three thousand years ago.Try living a day without using anything that was invented in the last hundred years and you’ll find that it’s incredibly easy. Try living a day without using anything that was invented in the last thousand years and you’ll find that it’s not at all hard. We need to have a real reevaluation of our concept of progress.

In fact many of the advances which we have made over the last ten thousand years have either been offset or arose in direct consequence of other areas of our lives which have deteriorated. The domestication of livestock made protein-rich diets far more available but it also unleashed a wave of infectious diseases which still plague us today. Agriculture itself offered humans far more power over the source of food and for the first time in our history allowed us to mitigate the inherent risk of the hunter gatherer lifestyle. Agriculture however also allowed us to give up the itinerance of the hunter-gatherer lifestyle and adopt the sedentary lifestyle which we still live today. That sedentary lifestyle allowed us, for the first time in our history, to accumulate more possessions than we could carry. Accumulating possessions and increasing consumption meant growth which meant profit. The birth of agriculture was quickly followed by the birth of consumerism. Consumerism simmered for millennia under the yoke of feudalism until eventually exploding midway through the last millennium with the advent of fully fledged capitalism. We need to step back and reevaluate many of the great advances we have made and try to disentangle them from many negative side-effects which they had.

Another important thing this book did is make me look at indigenous people in a whole new way. Australia has a ferocious natural environment and for the Aboriginal people to survive here for 40,000 with very little assistance in the form of outside technology making its way in is nothing short of one of humankind’s greatest ever achievements. Australians were incredibly isolated and the available flora and fauna were only able to support what by Eurasian standards were very small populations. Any knowledge which humans brought to Australia 40,000 years ago had to be guarded and diligently passed down from generation to generation. There was no second chance. Knowledge lost once was lost forever or until someone could invent it again. Aboriginal Australians did lose some knowledge and because of their low population sizes and the incessant iteration required to invent anything it was very hard for them to regain that knowledge. According to this book the indigenous Tasmanians had even lost the ability to create fire, something which humans in Africa had worked out how to do over a million years before. The conventional attitude has long been to look down on indigenous peoples as uncivilised and primitive but in truth they were highly adapted and resourceful. In an age when we look to not just reduce our consumption of resources but also consume them more efficiently I’m sure that there is a lot we can learn from indigenous people.

Another thing this book made me realise is that until the advent of agriculture humans always lived mutually. Hunter gatherers are limited in what they can own to what they can carry. Profit just isn’t an option.That’s not to say that hunter gatherers lived lives of kindness and peace. Diamond gives first hand accounts of the kind of internecine violence which often blights tribal societies. The point is that beyond the rivalries and violence there had to be an unspoken spirit of mutualism. Indigenous Australians didn’t survive for 40,000 years by looking after each other sometimes and fighting each other all the time; they survived by looking after each other all the time and fighting each other sometimes.

Many of the things which we enjoy today, the things that make us happy, are things which indigenous people had been enjoying for millenia before we arrived. Friends, family, love, laughter, food, water, dance, music, games, crafts, arts, religion, storytelling, nature – these are the things that make us happy nowadays and they were the exact same things that made indigenous Australians happy.

I suspect and hope that the attitudes of future humans will be far more akin to those of the indigenous new world people who survived and thrived for so long with so little than those of the profligate Europeans who destroyed them.

The Railway Children by Edith Nesbit
This middle class masterpiece could feasibly be the bible of the mutualist movement. A happy wealthy family in suburban London is forced to downsize and move to the country when the father is imprisoned for selling secrets to the Russians. What follows is the story of three children learning the joy of kindness. The message is clear: a mutual life is a happy life. I cried a number of times while reading it. It’s a beautiful book. I’d recommend it to everyone.

Wages and mutualism

Within a mutualist economy wages become incredibly important. Under a pure mutualist economy, one in which no one profits from owning capital, labour is the only way to generate wealth. That’s why salary surveys like this one are so fascinating to a mutualist. Many of the jobs in this list are essential but also seriously underpaid. By underpaid I mean that they would struggle to live a happy life on that level of income. Money can’t buy you happiness whatever this economist says but the stress which comes from lack of money certainly can make you unhappy. We live in a society with a hidden underclass of underpaid workers who are doubly tortured by our constant equating of status with wealth and happiness with consumption. Hopefully a mutualist society would go a long way to addressing the unequal value that we place on labour.

This survey of public sector pay is equally fascinating. There are a large number of people on this list who I really think shouldn’t be in the public sector at all. As I pointed out in the comments, media, banking, post, health, education – all these things should be mutualised with appropriate safeguards in place to promote equality and protect the quality of service. Someone retorted in the comments:

Sincerely hope you are being ironic. Lumping educators and medical professionals in with tv presenters?

There most certainly is justification for us all to contribute to the education of healthy citizens. If you genuinely can’t see why, I’m not going to be the one to spell it out for you.

Mutualists can still believe in public funding but not as a first resort. The first resort should always be to mutualise and the last resort (if at all) would be to privatise. I believe that all children should receive a free education funded by the government. I strongly believe in not-for-profit media as well.

Funding for public services within a mutualist economy must be done without relying on economic growth or profit. That means that corporate income taxes, capital gains taxes and dividend taxes just couldn’t be relied on. Sales taxes could not be relied on either because of the fatal wound which I believe a mutualist economy would inflict on consumerism and inflation. The decline in consumerism and the end of inflation would also have signifcant impacts on wage inflation which would in turn have a major knock-on effect on income taxes. If you have a look at the breakdown of UK tax revenues then a large proportion of them look like they would be signicantly jeopardised by a move to mutualise our lives.

Large government relies on a large private sector to fund it. As we’ve found out over the last 10 years in the UK, governments with large social spending plans often end up fetishising economic growth. For wealthy industrialised countries the relentless pursuit of economic growth does far more damage than the ensuing tax levies are able to repair. So long as people insist on their services being provided by the government they are always going to be subjecting themselves to the yoke of consumerism and the banal to-and-fro of left-right politics.