If you see just ONE graph this decade…

Dec 8, 2011 – Unsurprising, but jaw-dropping – this graph which George Monbiot linked to a few weeks ago. A continual rise in productivity, matched by a rise in wages… until around 1980. Hold in mind the perpetual rise in productivity, and consider…

Polly Toynbee recently tweeted about Robert Skidelsky’s Occupy LSX talk: “Modern capitalism over produces work and under produces leisure…Skidelsky speaking sense… says 25 hr [working] w[ee]k… Citizens income for work/leisure choice.”

In his new book (on Keynes & the economic crisis), Skidelsky quotes a paper by Thomas Palley, which argues that under the neoliberal model (starting around 1980): “the commitment to full employment was abandoned as inflationary, with the result that the link between productivity growth and wages was severed.” With productivity growing and wages falling in real terms, consumer demand was built upon increasingly high levels of household debt.

All true, of course. But what many accounts leave out is the staggering level of technological advance since 1980. (Advances which ultimately wouldn’t exist without public funding/infrastructure). This enormous technological component of productivity doesn’t translate into wages for human labour, hence the necessity of solutions such as a Citizen’s Income.

It’s good to see commentators such as Robert Skidelsky and Polly Toynbee talking about a Citizen’s Income. This is the same proposal that goes under the names Basic Income, UBI, National Dividend, etc (I’ve written about these proposals in more detail here). I suspect you’ll be hearing a lot more about Citizen’s Income in the months/years to come.

Meanwhile, I think the graph should be tattooed onto our brains…

Sources of graphs:
http://www.nytimes.com/imagepages/2011/09/04/opinion/04reich-graphic.html
http://www.irle.berkeley.edu/events/spring08/feller/
http://thecurrentmoment.wordpress.com/2011/08/18/productivity-inequality-poverty/
http://jkornacki.com/?p=1195
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jonathan-tasini/conspiracy-of-silence-wag_b_155531.html
http://currydemocrats.org/in_perspective/american_pie.html
http://www.rebelcapitalist.com/index.php/site/permalink/tapped-out/
http://the-wawg-blog.org/?tag=mega-rich
http://www.exponentialimprovement.com/cms/hannityinsanity.shtml

Frank Luntz reframes Occupy

Dec 5, 2011 – Frank Luntz is the US rightwing’s language guru. He publishes message-framing manuals for conservatives. (BBC’s Newsnight uses him as a pollster, but that’s another story). It was Luntz who, during the US health care debate, advised using terms such as “government-run” instead of “public option” – his focus groups had responded less favourably to the terms that (falsely) implied government funding.

A recent news report claims that Luntz has been advising Republicans on how to talk about the Occupy movement:

“I’m so scared of this anti-Wall Street effort. I’m frightened to death,” said Frank Luntz, a Republican strategist … “They’re having an impact on what the American people think of capitalism.”
(Yahoo! News 1/12/11)

The report lists Luntz’s 10 tips. These include telling the Occupy movement “I get it”, and avoiding the words “sacrifice” and “compromise”. But the ones which caught my attention were:-

• ‘Don’t say “capitalism” … I’m trying to get that word removed and we’re replacing it with either “economic freedom” or “free market”.’
• ‘Don’t say that the government “taxes the rich”. Instead, tell them that the government “takes from the rich”.’
• ‘Don’t say “government spending”. Call it “waste”.’
• ‘Always blame Washington. Tell them, “You shouldn’t be occupying Wall Street, you should be occupying Washington”.‘

You won’t be surprised to hear that little of this is new. It’s a series of frames (about government and markets) which together form what George Lakoff calls the Economic Liberty Myth. It’s already established in people’s minds from years of repetition via mass media, promoted by “market” thinktanks, city pundits, etc. In a nutshell, it’s about “freedom” – particularly “freedom of competition”, which supposedly leads to optimum “efficiency”, “opportunity”, etc. The “market” is cast as the freedom-loving hero, with the government as villain. (I go into more detail here, under the subheading “The Market Discipline frame”).

Occupy gives it a new twist

It’s the new developments that Frank Luntz is so afraid of. Namely:

• The focus on financial sector bailouts.
• The focus on the “99% vs 1%”; the immoral division of wealth.

The problem for Luntz is that even by “conventional” (ie sympathetic to “market”/city, private-wealth) standards of media coverage, the rightwing Economic Liberty Myth looks simply false in the context of the financial collapse/bailouts. (Why? Again, I provide a more detailed explanation of the framing issues here).

That’s why Luntz is saying: “You shouldn’t be occupying Wall Street, you should be occupying Washington”. And it’s why “market” lobby groups in the UK (such as the TaxPayers’ Alliance) are going to great lengths to frame the financial collapse in terms of government failures – as well as simply shifting the focus (and public anger) back to “government waste” (including the usual tabloid favourites – “benefit cheats“, etc).

The Economic Liberty Myth won’t be able to withstand a sustained, widespread popular focus on the financial collapse/bailouts and the immoral division of wealth – Luntz is right to be frightened.

Framing Occupy’s “demands”

Nov 23, 2011 – Should the Occupy movement make specific policy demands? I see two different approaches getting coverage – eg George Lakoff’s (Huffington Post) and Michael Albert’s (Guardian)…

Lakoff says it’s “a good thing” that Occupy isn’t “making specific policy demands”. He argues that Occupy is about a shift in “moral focus”, and that, “If the movement is to frame itself, it should be on the basis of its moral focus, not a particular agenda or list of policy demands.”

Lakoff’s work (on moral-framing systems) shows how the American right succeeded by framing political issues in terms of a moral system which appeals to the “rugged individualist” identity, and which gives primacy to self-reliance and self-discipline, etc. Lakoff describes this moral system as follows:

“Conservatives have figured out their moral basis, and you see it on Wall Street. It includes: the primacy of self-interest. Individual responsibility, but not social responsibility. Hierarchical authority based on wealth or other forms of power. A moral hierarchy of who is “deserving,” defined by success.” [George lakoff, Framing Memo for OWS]

A large proportion of “the 99%” appear to vote out of identification with this “conservative” moral system – apparently against their own “rational” interests (as economists would put it). It seems important to realise this. Lakoff’s work is partly an attempt to explain why, and to offer alternative approaches (see below).

Michael Albert (co-editor of ZNet) suggests a different approach in his recent piece for the Guardian. Albert says that when a movement has sufficient strength (in numbers) it should make demands that “appeal to a very wide constituency”. The first example suggested by Albert is “the demand for full employment”:

“[S]eeking full employment makes sense because firing people is a way out of the current crisis that leaves elites stronger than they were before. It is a way out that leads right back to business as usual, with, in addition, a bonus for the rich and powerful in the form of a weakened working class. Clearly, we don’t want that. We want the opposite, a stronger working class and weaker elites. And that is the point. Full employment strengthens all workers, and it weakens all owners.”
[Michael Albert, Guardian, 15/11/11]

Albert adds that the larger “workforce” would work fewer hours “until the economy is back in shape”. He suggests “30 hours’ work for 40 hours’ pay, at least for everyone who is earning less than some quite high amount”.

“Full employment” – a fascist notion?

I shudder in horror whenever I hear the term “full employment”. The well-intentioned folk who propose it aren’t (I hope) thinking of forced labour, but it’s difficult to see how the latter doesn’t follow directly from the former. The ironies here… that a movement such as Occupy would propose an idea that seems deeply conservative* at best, and which has brutally authoritarian implications, at worst. Albert’s claim that “Full employment strengthens all workers, and it weakens all owners” seems, to me, an inversion of evidential reality in important respects – and it appears to confuse “employment” with livable income.

There’s enough material on the fascistic-seeming “full employment” framing for several articles, so I’ll leave further comment for future pieces. For now, consider the ways in which Michael Albert’s suggestions might conceptually “reinforce” the rightwing Economic Liberty Myth (a term coined by Lakoff). For example, Albert says Occupy should demand that people who have been fired are “rehired”. Central to the Economic Liberty Myth is the notion that employers “give jobs” to employees. This is what makes employers the heroes in the narrative – employers as the source not just of income, but of “meaningful activity” (“work”) and social relationships. The only other alternative (according to the myth) is: people sitting at home doing nothing, wasting their lives, isolated, socially useless parasites. In this quaint fairy tale, the employers – the bosses, the owners – save us all from that horrible fate. We demand it.

Lakoff’s alternative

To return to Lakoff’s idea: that Occupy frames itself “on the basis of its moral focus, not a particular agenda or list of policy demands.” What would this look like in practice? Lakoff’s analysis of the “nurturant” morality which underlies progressive politics suggests the following:

• Publicise The Public: Frame in terms of the common wealth, public infrastructure, public lands, public safety nets. As Lakoff puts it: “The Public is not opposed to The Private. The Public is what makes The Private possible. And it is what makes freedom possible. Wall Street exists only through public support. It has a moral obligation to direct itself to public needs.”

• Reframe The Private Market: Large corporations/banks act like private governments and should be framed as such. They use vast amounts of taxpayers’ money. And not just in bailouts. They’ve always depended on publicly-funded infrastructure. Avoid the corporation-as-individual metaphorical frame, which transfers the notion of “rights” from the domain of individual persons to institutions of concentrated wealth and power.

(My own modest contribution – explained here & here – is that the financial sector should be framed in terms of systemic risk rather than by conventional economic-framing of “competition”, “efficiency”, etc).

• Reframe Income/Work: Technology is, to a large extent, publicly-funded. (Boeing and Microsoft, for example, wouldn’t exist without the decades of public funding of aerospace and computer research and development). The great concentration of private wealth resulting from productivity increases (due to publicly-underwritten technological advances) should be framed as immoral. The so-called “labour market” can be framed as an ideological construct which has failed to provide a fair distribution of wealth, even with relatively high levels of “employment”.

Elsewhere (Moral Politics, p421), Lakoff has suggested a Negative Income Tax as a means of more fairly distributing wealth. But since we’re discussing how Occupy might frame a shift in moral focus, rather than specific policy, I won’t go into details here. (I’ve written about Negative Income Tax – and similar schemes – in a previous piece).

Additional material

Douglas Rushkoff does a great job of reframing the whole job/income issue here (video) & here.

See also this interesting piece on Lakoff/Occupy from the Overweening Generalist blog.

* I agree with Bob Black’s essay, The Abolition of Work, that all ideologies (whether Marxist, Liberal or Conservative, etc) seem conservative to the extent that they believe in maximising employment.